Website Technology

Have a look at this article and spoof video here:

http://www.getelastic.com/ecommerce-video-checkout-personal-information/

As we’ve said before, reducing the hurdles during the checkout process is crucial to serving customers well, and showing the total price (including delivery) as early on as possible is a good idea.

Here are two ads that we have been running on Google Adwords. Guess which one receives more clicks:

The ad on the left has been viewed 125 times, and nobody has clicked on it. The ad on the right has been viewed 73 times, and 4 people have clicked on it. The only difference is in the URL at the bottom - one displays YuppieChef.com, and one displays YuppieChef.co.za (both addresses go to the same place).

200 people is not a huge test-group, but if the trend continues it raises an interesting question about what our branding and marketing strategy should be. Until now we have been pushing the .com version of YuppieChef because we feel it looks more professional and allows us to expand internationally in time. However, for now our market is entirely South African, and this little test seems to suggest that South Africans would rather visit a .co.za website if they are looking for stuff to buy. Perhaps they have been disappointed too many times after looking at a lovely international website and then finding that delivery to South Africa is not available or too expensive.

Changing the address on a Google advert is easy enough, but what about when we print vouchers, business cards and vehicle signage? Perhaps the same rules don't apply - if you see YuppieChef.com on a vehicle driving down Long Street in Cape Town, would you presume that the site has South African delivery?

A big reason that we are pursuing online businesses as opposed to physical stores is the relatively small amount of capital that is needed to set up shop. Our goal is to create the methods, systems, processes and marketing plans to launch a new business and have it supporting the owner within a year. Clearly we're talking a different language to the big boys. Netflorist have published a press release where they boast about their R3 million site redesign and system overhaul, apparently moving to Microsoft Commerce Server technology. I have to admit the site looks pretty good, and there is no doubt they are handling way bigger volumes than we are. But R3 million? If we had that type of cash we could hire 5 decent programmers and designers to work solidly for nearly 3 years. I wonder whether I could keep them busy for more than a few months?

At Live Alchemy we develop most of our website technology in-house (other than a few open source plug-ins or tools like Google Analytics), using PHP and MySQL, and hosting on Linux servers with Hetzner. We have explored various off-the-shelf and free shopping cart systems, but years of working on homegrown systems has given us a level of familiarity that is hard to give up. However, there is a lot to learn from other systems, so we will be reviewing and researching things like MS Commerce Server in months to come.

This afternoon I had my first "call" from someone on a site who clicked on the Live Chat link. Here is how it went:

Visitor: can you help me get a bugzapper to port elizabeth by tuesday 12th december?

Andrew: We certainly can, but we will need to courier it. Do you want just 1 racket?

Visitor: can you send me three?

Andrew: Of course!

Andrew: Will you be paying by credit card or bank transfer?

Visitor: great. credit card

Andrew: OK. Go ahead and place the order through the site and pay, and I will make sure it gets to you by Tuesday. Make sure to enter a daytime physical address, with a postal code.

Visitor: thanks very much. have a good day

We will never know for certain, but I'm pretty sure that the conversion he had with me led to the sale of 3 Bug Zappers. We don't publish a phone number on the website (we're trying to run our sites at a slight arm's length) so his only other alternative would have been to e-mail us with his query, but he probably wouldn't have trusted that we would have responded in time, so he wouldn't have bothered. Because he could find out right away about his order he went ahead.

Recently I was battling to log in to BusinessWarriors.co.za and I noticed a link to "Click here for live help". I clicked on the icon and was greeted by a friendly (real) person who helped me through the process of logging in. I had seen this type of chat on other sites, but never before had it helped me so effectively and quickly. The alternative would have been to fill out a form or an e-mail, and probably wait a day for a response (if at all!).

The service on Business Warriors is provided by LivePerson.com. I poked around a bit on their site and they seem to be quite comprehensive, although a bit pricey at $99/month. A bit of Googling uncovered another option in ProvideSupport.com who seem to offer something very similar, but starting at $15/month.

I have set up the 10 day trial of ProvideSuuport.com on 2 of our e-commerce sites (www.flagkit.co.za and www.bugzapper.co.za) to see if our visitors/potential clients would make use of it. 24 hours later nobody has requested a chat, so perhaps the South African market is not educated enough on what live support would entail? Perhaps we can lay blame on the usual "slow internet" culprit and guess that the average SA surfer doesn't have time and bandwidth to click on links that look too fancy? Or maybe our sites are simple enough to not require help! ;-)

If you are interested to test out the service please feel free to visit on of the sites mentioned above and click on the link. An operator should be on-hand to take your call (ie, me!). I am really excited about this type of service and what it could do to improve the web experience for everyone. I can think of a ton of sites that I use and wish I could chat to someone about.

[PS - you might be reading this post some time in the future, and we might not be using this service on our sites anymore. If that's the case then clearly we decided it isn't worth it!]