Category: E-Commerce

Open Source On The Rise, Online Work Index

The April Online Work Index reveals that IT and marketing skills continue to dominate the online work landscape as the Top 10 graphic clearly demonstrates.

Beyond the general demand for technology and marketing skills, businesses are clearly chasing domain expertise in open source technologies, help with delivering world-class user experiences, and insiders with savvy working with social media.

  • Open Source on the Rise: The overall trend of businesses migrating to open source technology solutions is stronger than ever with PHP (#1) programming now topping the Index followed closely by MySQL (#2). Demand grows for a variety of other open source skills including Joomla (#18), Drupal (#48 – up 10 spots), osCommerce, (#49 – up 20 spots), Ruby on Rails (#73 – up 27 spots), and Linux (#74 – up 13 spots).
  • User Experience Paramount: With more pressure than ever for companies to compete with world-class user experience, hiring trends show accelerating interest in technologies that deliver and enable great customer experiences, such as HTML (#3 – up 3 spots), Flash (#10 – up 2 spots), AJAX (#12 – up 14 spots), JAVA (#16 – up 13 spots), and – the biggest mover on the list – Actionscript (#56 – up 43 spots).
  • Social Media Rising: Social media continues to gain mainstream traction as companies strive to connect with customers, drive traffic, and become part of the online conversation with their communities of users, partners and even prospects. Demand for professionals skilled in developing for Facebook, Twitter, and blogging applications is surging. WordPress (#15) and Blogs (#19) crack the top 20, while Social Networking (#38) moves up 6 spots, Facebook (#61) is up 10 spots and Twitter (#93) makes its debut on the Index.

Making E-Commerce and Your Physical Store Work Together

In today’s fast paced business world it is not common place for a business to have a website and offer it’s products online – it is expected. If you have a physical storefront and are not offering your items for sale online you are actually well behind your competition. However, there are a few best practices you will need to take into account when transferring your physical presence online.

Making It All Work Together

So you have made the decision that you want to offer your store’s or business’s products online. Great! Now what do you need to do to make sure that you are achieving a high level of synergy between your physical and virtual stores? Keep reading to learn more.

1. Maintain Branding
Your online customers need to feel like they are in your physical store when they visit your website. You need to make sure you are branding your e-commerce website to have the same look and feel as your physical store. Your brand is your identity in the business world. Do not let it be lost just because your customers are visiting your online store.

2. Advertise Your Website in Your Store
You no doubt spend money advertising your store and website. However, one of the best ways to get high conversion traffic (traffic that is likely to make a purchase) to your website is to advertise your website to your current customers. Make sure you are featuring your website prominently in your store, on your business cards and when advertising your store.

Customers that may be visiting your physical store from out of town or who do not frequent your physical location will find ordering on your website much more convenient.

3. And Vice Versa – Advertise Your Store On Your Website
If you are doing a good job at search engine optimization there is no doubt that people that are not even aware of your physical store will find your website. This is a good thing! However, online stores are a dime a dozen and customers are generally hesitant to give out their billing information to just anyone.

You can solve this problem by prominently advertising your physical store on your website. People feel better about buying from an established business rather than some random drop shipper. Make it easy for customers to find your store. Advertise your business phone number, address, and business hours. Feature a map using Google Maps or Mapquest showing where your store is located. Show photos from your store on an ‘About Us’ page. Make your online customers feel like they are in your store.

What Now?

Try to incorporate the above best practices into your new e-commerce website and you will have a good one. If you would like to learn more about how we can help you accomplish your e-commerce goals head over to the e-irfan.com Website or Contact Us Today.