Clothing retailers selling luxury products have a tough time online both presenting the right image of their brand as well as being commercially successful.

The Internet is often presented as the place to get bargains with companies’ frequently offering discounts if you buy online – this is in sharp contrast to the image luxury retailers want to promote.

On the high street, luxury stores are exclusive and generally only consumers with the necessary funds tend to go in to browse around. The Internet, however, is open to all consumers and so this exclusivity is lost.

It is important therefore that luxury retailers re-create an opulent online experience for consumers that reflects the atmosphere of their high street stores.

Another stumbling block for luxury brands is how to convey the quality of their clothes online. The consumer isn’t able to actually see the item and try it on for real, it is therefore absolutely vital that every step is taken to ensure the user is shown each product in minute detail.

There are various ways to present products to the consumer so that all the characteristics of the item are fully displayed. Such as:

• 3D spin – allowing the user to look at the product from every angle and get a feel for how the item would look if it was in their hands
• Zoom – zoom features permit the consumer to look at each item in close detail e.g. stitching, quality of fabric etc
• Colour – the ability to see the same item in various colours

Along with these features, there are several Web 2.0 elements that could greatly assist a detailed representation of a product. For example:

Videos – having videos of a model wearing the items of clothing lets the user see how the product would actually look when it is worn. Often it is very hard for the consumer to make an assumption of how a garment would look without seeing it on a real person.
Podcasts – a retailer could feature podcasts with information and/or tips on how best to wear products, accessories etc.

For information on how Motive could help you create the right representation of your luxury brand online, get in touch with our Ecommerce Team.

Ensuring that visitors have a good experience of your ecommerce website is key to online success. This experience will greatly impact on both a decision to buy from you and a visitors perception of your brand.

More and more consumers are choosing to buy their products from the internet and as a result retailers must focus the same level of attention on their ecommerce website as they would their high street stores.

A recent poll conducted by technology provider RightNow and the Loudhouse organisation found that 72% of people who shop on the internet believed that a good online user experience would be the second highest influencing factor when deciding where to buy a product.

Enabling your customers to easily find the product they want through simple and logical navigation of your website is obviously crucial but it is also highly worthwhile to display associated promotions and incentives alongside your products to increase conversion values. Without the personal interaction that occurs in the store it is important that users feel that you are informing them prior to purchase and supporting them throughout the entire sales process.

If a user doesn’t find what they are looking for early on in their visit to your website they will leave and look elsewhere online. This will drive consumers to your competitors and mean that users leave your website with a negative image of your brand.

To find out how Motive could improve the online experience of your brand, get in touch with our Ecommerce Team.

When it comes to PPC advertising, it is crucial to achieve a high Quality Score for your adverts. The Quality Score Google assigns your keywords affects several aspects of your advertising campaign, including; how much you pay per click, if your advert shows and if it does, in what position it appears.

Google assigns a Quality Score to each keyword in your campaign. The Quality Score ranges from; Poor, OK, Good to Great.

There are various factors that affect the Quality Score of your keywords. These include the historical click through rate of your adverts, the keywords relevance to the adverts you are running and the content quality of your landing page – i.e how many times your chosen keywords are appearing in the text on your landing page.

A recent addition to how Google calculates your overall Quality Score is the time it takes your landing page to load. This hasn’t been widely publicised and many advertisers are probably unaware that this is now an important factor in the Quality Score.

There are various ways of improving the load time of your landing page. These include:

• Avoiding the use of redirects
• Keeping the page size as small as possible
• Compressing images to reduce the file size
• Keeping the use of flash to a minimum
• Not having third party content on the page

To find out more about optimising your website to assist your PPC campaigns, speak to our Marketing Team.

A highly effective strategy in ecommerce is multiple channel selling. This involves having several niche websites targeting different demographics, displaying specific product ranges. This allows you to create completely focused websites with a high sales conversion rate.

It is often helpful in the retail space to appear to your consumers under a different persona. This could be for various reasons – sometimes political but sometimes simply aesthetically. It is important that you project the right corporate image for the individual products you are selling. For example, you might have redundant stock that you want to get rid of; this technology would enable you to develop a bargain website where people can buy items at discount prices, without devaluing your parent brand.

This strategy is also effective when you need a microsite specific to a particular marketing campaign or particular product which still links in to your main corporate website. This allows you to have fully branded sites specific to one product brand without increasing the administration or management as the content can be driven by your main database.

Having these various websites means that you can target individual affiliate campaigns, pay per click campaigns and other online marketing strategies to drive traffic with a high potential of converting to the right website.

To find out more about Motive’s multi channel ecommerce platform, please get in touch with our ecommerce experts.

As the explosion of blogs on the internet continues to grow – 105 million blogs already in existence with 120,000 new blogs created daily – retailers must realise the importance of having their own corporate blog on the website. It is expected that by 2010 – 70% of all content on the web will be user generated so it is crucial that retailers do not get left behind.

The one to one contact that retailers are able to have with customers is lost in the faceless world of retail websites. Having a blog enables you to project a human voice to your customers and break the formality of the rest of the website. The blog is somewhere you can speak as a human being rather than a company and customers are able to respond and post their own opinions and comments. This helps to build a personal relationship with your customers and you are able to respond and react to their comments, suggestions etc.

Although the idea of customers posting up their own comments and views on products etc is an unsettling concept for some retailers, it is better that consumers have somewhere to do this on your own site rather than elsewhere where the conversation is out of your control and you are unable to respond quickly and effectively.

Another advantage to having a blog is that it will greatly help your SEO strategy. You will be able to write blogs filled with all important keyboards and if you are blogging regularly you will be ensuring your site is full of fresh new content – search engine spiders love websites that are regularly updated.

To find out more about how you can integrate blogging into your ecommerce solution, feel free to contact the experts.

In order for your ecommerce website to be found by users searching in the search engines you must ensure you have an SEO friendly website both structurally and from a content perspective.

Search engines like Google have automated programmes called bots or spiders which crawl a website, indexing pages as they work through the site. When a user types in a query the search engine crawls through its index to find the pages that are most relevant to that query and then brings them up in the Natural Listings.

In order for the spiders to pick up the pages of your site they must be fully optimised for SEO with keyword rich content and a structure that the spiders can easily follow.

Obviously the main objective of ecommerce websites is to sell products, which usually involves having pages with lists of items and little content and therefore little for the spiders to crawl. There are several strategies you can adopt to combat this problem and ensure that the various pages of your site to get indexed by the spiders.

The first strategy you should adopt is to create content rich landing pages which then feed into your individual product pages. These content based landing pages should have keyword friendly links which also feed out into the product pages.

Another method of improving your rankings in the search results is to include pages which focus on ‘selling’ your products, explaining the various qualities and benefits of the products your company has on offer. Like the landing pages, these pages can also be fully optimised with the keywords you want your site to appear for and contain keyword rich links that then link out to the product pages.

The structure of your website is also crucial. Our ecommerce platform Engineus™ can create SEO friendly URL’s which will enable the pages of your site to be easily picked up the search engine’s spiders. The software can also dynamically generate keyword rich meta descriptions and page titles – all working to ensure the spiders are finding and indexing the pages of your website.

Product bundling is a very effective ecommerce marketing strategy which allows you to sell a number of products together thus creating additional sales and maximising the potential of your cross selling and up selling opportunities.

Bundling allows the retailer to heavily affect the choices customers make whilst browsing their ecommerce website. Traditionally whilst shopping in stores customers effectively created their own bundles, making their own decisions of what products to buy. Bundles allow the retailer to make this decision for the consumer to ensure an end result that benefits both the customer and seller alike.

Bundles are a much more effective method of persuading customers to make further purchases by highlighting the benefits of buying one product with another. For example, if someone was buying a digital camera they may not think to also buy a case, memory card etc. Bundles quickly highlight that these products compliment each other which along with a discounted total price encourages the customer to make a group purchase

Bundles are easy to change and adapt to suit whatever requirements the retailers has at that time. Enabling vendors to promote different products at different times and maximise the revenue from their online sales.

A good example of our bundles feature in action can be seen on the website of one of our ecommerce clients, Jessops:

www.jessops.com

With e-commerce now fully established - over £40 million spent online last year, it seems 2008 could be the year that m-commerce finally takes off in the UK. With the introduction of new devices such as the iPhone, web usability on the mobile is going to be vastly improved, creating countless opportunities for the retail sector.

More people own a mobile phone than a PC and our mobiles are much more personal to us than our computers. 4,000 texts are sent in the UK every second, highlighting the close relationship consumers have with their mobile device. This makes it an ideal platform for retailers to capture customers.

Most research carried out in m-commerce has highlighted that currently people in the UK use their mobile to research product prices and locations of stores – the challenge for retailers is to convert this research into conversions.

Retailers must ensure they secure consumers trust in their mobile websites reflecting the issues that originally plagued e-commerce in the early days. Guarantees of credit card safety and secure payment methods will ensure consumer confidence in mobile websites and as a result, sales.

The key to success in the m-commerce market is offering consumers a better quality of service than other retailers. Enabling orders made via mobile to be picked up in stores as well as permitting users to stop and restart sessions at their convenience would greatly encourage people to purchase goods using their mobile device. New developments in mobile platforms such as the iPhone are a promising sign that mobile browsing will soon be much easier for consumers. Retailers must ensure their mobile websites are as clean and user-friendly as possible. Unlike web browsing, vertical navigation is a must with focus on text rather than images.

The potential of mobile technology for the retail sector is endless. Many retailers are already using SMS to alert customers of special events and offers and Bluetooth technology could lead to customers receiving sales messages the minute they walk into stores.

To find out more about m-commerce strategies and the increased sales you can expect contact our mobile team

Until recently, there was no easy way to validate that a purchaser on an ecommerce website is indeed the legitimate cardholder. 3D Secure technology was launched to reduce the likelihood of online fraud, by authenticating the cardholder with the card issuer at the time the transaction takes place, thus significantly reducing cardholder disputes and merchant chargeback’s.

3D Secure requires the cardholder to register their card (on the card issuers website) answering a number of security questions. The cardholder then sets up a password and secret phrase which will be used by the card issuer for every online transaction. Once signed up the cardholder uses this personalised password for every online purchase on sites with 3D Secure integration.

This technology is designed to increase consumer confidence in using credit cards online – an issue that is key to commercial success on the internet. However, retailers need to be careful about its integration into a website as not all consumers are yet aware of the technology and therefore if handled incorrectly could actually increase the risk of shopping cart abandonment.

As there has been very little media coverage of the new 3D Secure technology, the average consumer is unaware of its uses, therefore there is work to be done for merchants in creating awareness and highlighting the benefits in order to prevent consumer confusion and shopping cart abandonment.

It may be advisable to add information within the buying process to explain and reassure consumers or perhaps have a link to a page that explains exactly what 3D Secure is and the benefits it presents for people buying products online.

Despite these teething issues, the introduction of this technology is an exciting one and will protect ecommerce merchants from online fraud plus increase consumer confidence in purchasing from sites with 3D secure integration.

3D Secure is predicted to become the industry standard by the end of 2008, providing online consumers with added confidence in sites utilising this technology. We have successfully integrated 3D Secure to ecommerce clients Toner Expert and Red Express, plus we are currently completing work on Jessops.com.

Welcome to the new Motive Technology Ecommerce Blog. We are very excited about the launch of this blog and hope it will be an informative and useful resource as well as showcasing hints and tips for the industry.

We are looking forward to discussing new technologies within the market and sharing ideas with other people interested in the world of ecommerce.