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Posts Tagged ‘Tips and Tricks’
 Do you have brick and mortar stores in addition to your Volusion store? Are you a manufacturer (with a Volusion site) who’d like to tell your customers where to find your products in the real world? Do you have no practical use for an interactive map, but you really, really want one anyway? Well guess what, buttercup… we’re prepared to hook you up!
We’ve been doing store locators for clients for some time, but every once in a while we feel compelled to remind you of the many, many ways we can alter your Volusion store to suit your particular needs. In this latest case, BulletProofDiesel.com came to us with an existing Volusion store, but no good way to tell their online clients where they could have their products installed locally. That’s where our Volusion store locator implementation came in. Now, anyone browsing their online store will be easily able to pinpoint a local vendor, helping to seal the conversion and creating a brand new satisfied customer. It’s just that easy.
Contact us if you’re interested in a store locator for your Volusion site! We’ll be happy to help.
Posted: Tuesday, June 8, 2010 in Brand Labs, Tips and Tricks
 From time to time, our big-brained programmers and developers take some time out of their busy schedules to impart a bit of their encyclopedic knowledge to the Volusion community at large. Today is just such an occasion.
If you follow this link to our knowledgebase, you’ll find an excellent tutorial on just how to… ummmm… er… well… how about if I just give you a little quote that explains the whole thing. From the article:
“Sometimes you need to make changes to many of your Volusion store’s products. Volusion’s Bulk Updates capability is great, but when you have a large number of products or lots of changes to make, even this may be cumbersome.
The solution is to export the products to your computer, make your changes in a spreadsheet program such as Microsoft Excel, and then import your products back into Volusion. Volusion covers importing and exporting quite well, so the purpose of this article is to expand on what is possible with import/export in Volusion.”
We couldn’t have said it any better. Hit the link to read the whole article…
Posted: Monday, March 29, 2010 in Search Engine Optimization, Volusion
 Search Engine Optimization (as we’ve mentioned multiple times in this blog) is a mysterious thing. Ask 20 people how to optimize a web page and you’ll get 20 different answers, but the one thing that you’re likely to hear over and over again is “quality content,” which is why quality content is an important element of every SEO campaign we manage. Of course, saying that you need quality content is easier than creating quality content, so we’ve put together a couple of tips that may help you out. Check them out after the jump…
Read the rest of this entry »
Posted: Thursday, March 25, 2010 in Google Analytics
For e-commerce websites, it is absolutely critical to have a proper implementation of Google Analytics that includes e-commerce tracking abilities. With this added code, you can see what sales you got from what sources and the associated revenue, allowing you as the business owner to make data-driven decisions about where best to spend your marketing money.
One thing that may be overlooked in this process is the “goal”. Commonly used to track micro conversions or macro conversions that don’t result in direct revenue, goals can also be applied to e-commerce websites to give you more data about your sales process.
By defining your receipt page as a “goal” in Analytics, you can then leverage the funnel visualization tool to set up a series of steps you’d like to see customers take on your site, and track how they perform. For example, let’s say you have a simple website that sells one product: Michigan State-themed Snuggies. You then would define your receipt page as a “goal” and then you’d associate the following funnel to it: first, you’d want to look at customers who start at your homepage, then who proceed to the product detail page, then to the shopping cart page, then to the payment details page, then who finally end up at your goal of the receipt page. This way, you have set up your funnel to see how people react to every aspect of your web design: from your home page’s call to action, to your product details page’s product descriptions, to your cart design and checkout process.
The value comes in using this to see which part of the process is broken. Maybe there is a very high fall off from people who view the cart page to those who actually enter their payment information. This could mean that the call-to-action and design of your shopping cart page needs tweaking. At Brand Labs, we saw this happen with one of our clients, which led us to create a modified version of the Volusion shopping cart page that has less distractions and a clearer call to action.
There’s no limit to the insight you can get from this funnel. From home page redesign, to merchandising issues, to navigation issues, the combination of goals and funnel visualizations can help any e-commerce site owner improve their site and drive more conversions.
Posted: Tuesday, March 9, 2010 in Google Analytics, Michigan
An all-too-often overlooked feature of Analytics is the Map Overlay, located under the Visitors section. To the untrained observer, this tool simply shows you the regional breakdown of where your traffic to your site comes from around the globe, but with a little bit of refinement, you can use it to visually compare how users in different cities, states, and countries interact with your web marketing efforts, and understand how it impacts your bottom line.
While working with one of our clients from our home state of Michigan, we made great use of the Map Overlay to demonstrate a better way to target their PPC efforts. Their brand is strong, drawing customers and users from all over the world to their locations. Through the power of the Map Overlay, we were able to visualize where the site’s international traffic was coming from, and then combined it with their e-commerce reporting to see which countries converted the best.
Now, you don’t have to be a geography whiz to see that the Midwest made the strongest showing, with the Mitten State leading the pack, but this begs the question: if we’re getting most of our sales at home, how can we best reach out to our hometown crowd? We then segmented the e-commerce data for Michigan to see which traffic sources produced what revenue at what conversion rate. Our findings: Michigan residents were much more likely to convert from offline marketing efforts and organic searches; the company’s PPC efforts in the state were not drawing in the desired high-potential visitors they were in states like Illinois and Wisconsin.
Because of this analysis, we were able to re-target the client’s PPC efforts (and budget) away from Michigan to other more valuable states, and focus more of their SEO efforts on keywords that Michigan residents were converting on. Of course, this is just a single, isolated example of the depth of Map View’s utility and it bears noting that there are little gems just like this scattered throughout Google Analytics. We’ll offer tips and tricks as time goes on, but here’s one you can take with you right now: get Google Analytics on your darn site immediately. (We understand that this is more of an imperative than either a tip or trick, but you should listen and obey. You’ll thank us later)
Posted: Thursday, March 4, 2010 in Tips and Tricks
 In our never-ending quest to share our Volusion-related knowledge with the world, we offer this latest entry into our growing knowledge base: Migration from FTP Published Blogger Blog to a Hosted Blogger Blog on Volusion.
Despite its blatant overuse of the word “blog” (and variations thereof), we’re entirely sure that many of you will find this little tutorial quite useful. Especially for those of you who like to blog with the blogger and blog bloggingly, blog, blog and bloggle with the bloggest blog in bloggly bloggington. Blog? Blog blog.
 Carnal DaMMAge, one of the leading online retailers of MMA-related goods, took a big step forward today with the launch of their iPhone-friendly website.
Now, Carnal DaMMAge’s customers will be able to shop (and buy) on a mobile-optimized Volusion site, eliminating one more barrier between browsing and conversion.
You, too, can have an iPhone-friendly Volusion store for less than a thousand dollars! (Okay… it’s $995, so not a lot less than a thousand… but still, it’s less.)
If you’d like to capture some of the ever-expanding mCommerce market (quickly and affordably) check out iVoloo. On the other hand, if you’d like to beat the tar out of someone, but you’d like to be sure you’re properly outfitted first, check out Carnal DaMMAge.
Posted: Friday, January 29, 2010 in Tips and Tricks
 We’ve posted a new article in our knowledge base, explaining how any Volusion merchant can create a custom email script that will allow you to utilize VSMTP to send emails that won’t count against the maximum newsletter e-mails allotted by your store service plan. Just a little Friday afternoon gift from us to you, our loyal readers.
 Every once in a while, something pops up on the Volusion forum that we would LOVE to comment on. It’s tough for us to see one of our Volusion-using brethren (and sistren?) struggling with a problem or a need that we know we could solve, yet be unable to tell them due to Volusion’s (completely fair) restriction on anything remotely like a sales pitch within their forum. While we understand the restriction, we are overcome with a desire to help, so we’ve decided that, from time to time, we’ll address a concern, problem or need that’s been posted in the Volusion forum here in this blog. Here’s a link to the post that inspired us to do so (you’ll need an account to access the thread.)
In this case the post didn’t explicitly express a need, but instead, included a link to this Internet Retailer article (which, itself, is quoting Compete’s Smartphone Intelligence survey for Q3 2009) that shows two things quite clearly. First, smartphone users are using their devices more and more, not just for “window shopping” but for actual mobile purchases (37% according to the survey). Second, they are less likely to make a mobile purchase on a site that hasn’t been optimized for the mobile experience.
We’ve been aware of this for some time and, as a matter of fact, last year we released iVoloo, which has the ability to take a select group of products from your store and offer them in an iPhone-friendly format for the shopper on the go. It’s a great tool and simply implementing it tells your customers that you understand their needs, but, the iVoloo wasn’t everything we’d hoped for. It was limited in the number of products it could display and it required our assistance to merchandise the mobile-specific format.
… but, we’ve been working on it and guess what? We are now poised to release iVoloo 2.0 and here’s the good news: not only can you put your whole damn store inside, but you’ll also be able to merchandise it easily (without any help from us) using the Volusion admin that you’re already familiar with! It’s as close to a plug-and-play solution as you could hope for.
The release of iVoloo 2.0 is mere weeks away and if you’re interested, you can contact us now and you’ll be one of the first to have this sweet new tool on your Volusion store as soon as it’s ready. Of course, you can also contact us for any other needs you may have, or you can post your question or need in the comments section of this post. Don’t worry, though… we keep our eyes on the Volusion forum and if something comes up there that we feel we can address, we’ll do so here.
Posted: Wednesday, December 9, 2009 in Apps and Plugins, Brand Labs
 What’s wrong with the picture at the left? It looks like a detail of a product page from a Volusion site… but what’s this? It has video in the image area! Not only that, but it’s not even the main image… it’s included as one of the “additional photos”! Clearly this is some sort of Photoshop trickery, because Volusion doesn’t do that.
… until now, that is. All thanks to the clever folks we keep locked away in a dark, little room in our custom development department.
See this sweet new product detail video in action. If you’d like to know how to add some punch to your Volusion store, contact us. We’ll be happy to work our magic on your behalf.
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