By Kirsty Gasston 7th May 2014
With increasing use of technology and the web among customer bases in all industry areas, websites are a key focus for businesses as part of their business and marketing strategies. With this new focus on websites and online marketing channels, it's easy to forgot about offline marketing channels, or to give them much lower priority. Offline channels, however, can be used very effectively to support your website and online marketing. But to in...
By Kirsty Gasston 27th March 2014
It is important that you understand and review how people browse your site. Even the best website designs can fail as users don't always browse and navigate through a site in the ways that we might expect. Focus groups with customers and members of your target market are an ideal way to gain great insights and feedback on how people navigate the site, how easily they locate the information that they're seeking and any barriers to conversion. Alth...
By Peter Chiu 20th March 2014
PayPal is one of the world’s leading and most recognisable payment gateway options in the world. With an estimated 110 million people in the world who shop with PayPal, it can be a great choice for many e-commerce websites. As standard PayPal accept all major debit and credit cards and it is an easy way to accept payment in up to 24 currencies from a total of 190 countries. Another advantage of using an established and well known provider such...
By Peter Chiu 5th March 2014
When creating your ecommerce website, one of the main things you need to consider is what type of payment gateway(s) you wish to offer. There are a number of payment gateways which can be integrated in to ecommerce websites from big names such as PayPal and HSBC to lesser known gateways that use crypto currencies such as Bit Pay which utilises Bitcoin. Sage Pay is a popular option for many online businesses as it is a proven and trusted gateway ...
By Jordan Hall 27th February 2014
I previously discussed the reasons why you should accept Bitcoin payments on your e-commerce website. Now, it is important to mention how to actually go about accepting bitcoins on your website. One of the concerns merchants can raise regarding bitcoins is their volatility. Due to how new the bitcoin economy is, their value can fluctuate significantly during the course of a day. Although investing in bitcoins by holding them can be quite profit...
By Peter Chiu 19th February 2014
As an online retailer you rely on traffic to your website to drive your sales and provide you with important statistics on how users found your website and where they came from, all of which is valuable information which enables you to plan your marketing strategies. Product feeds are structured data files which contains information relating to your products. This information can then be submitted to external organisations/websites, which can be...
By Ollie Reardon 6th February 2014
What is Responsive Web Design? Responsive Web Design is the modern approach to designing websites for multiple device screen sizes such as Desktop, Laptop, Tablet and Mobile displays. With the increase of new devices as methods of surfing the internet in recent years, website owners have to be prepared to serve for the end user’s device requirements, for example a smartphone’s display is a lot smaller than a laptop or desktop monitor, ther...
By Jordan Hall 27th January 2014
It is commonplace in web development to make use of a development and/or testing environment where websites live before they go in front of the ever watchful public. Many web development testing platforms exist, such as: A single development server which all developers share over a network Individual installations of web and databases servers on each developer's workstation Testing environments built into developer IDEs These methods all ha...
By Jordan Hall 12th December 2013
You might have heard of Bitcoin in the news. It's had a great deal of worldwide media attention in recent weeks. But what exactly is Bitcoin and how can it help your business and e-commerce website? Bitcoin is both a new digital currency and a payment system. It is a secure and very inexpensive method to handle payments online or in person. Bitcoin offers many advantages to businesses thinking about accepting them on their e-commerce website, s...
By Kirsty Gasston 24th May 2013
Most businesses have seasonality within their product offering. When your high season is coming up, you start to gear up for increased sales and marketing activity, right? And do you remember to include an email marketing campaign in your strategy? Many companies overlook the power of email marketing in boosting their seasonal sales. We have found that strategically timed email campaigns can make a big difference to sales figures, and are a real...
By Kirsty Gasston 2nd April 2013
Ecommerce is continuing to grow, with more and more shoppers purchasing on the web rather than going in-store. Selling your products online shouldn’t start and finish with your ecommerce website, though. It is also important to create Google Product Feeds so that your products will be listed in Google’s Shopping listings. Big name online sellers such as Amazon and Play also offer companies the ability to sell their products through their cha...
By Kirsty Gasston 28th March 2013
Rapid Web Services has recently completed a new website for By-Auction, a collection of member estate agents providing property services and offering properties for sale by auction. They approached us to develop a site for them that they could use to provide members of the public with tips and advice on selling property at auction, as well links to the member sites, dates of upcoming auctions and auction catalogues. By-Auction asked us to deve...