Congratulations to urLash, a new website that has launched on our systems today.

Congratulations to Buzz Beekeeping Supplies, a new website that has launched on our systems today.

Little splashers have today had a fantastic new makeover, visit the site now and have a look.

Superia would like to wish all our customers a very Happy Easter.

We'll be taking a short break over the Easter bank holiday weekends, however the support email address and contact form will be monitored throughout.

Good Friday: Closed

Saturday: Closed

Sunday: Closed

Easter Monday: Closed

As mentioned above, the support email and contact form will be monitored throughout and any support queries will be handled in our usual helpful and efficient way :o)

Here are 10 simple tips to help improve your ecommerce site conversion rates. Most are common sense but it’s often the obvious things that we miss in the process of building an eshop.

1. Use your home page like a shop window

Please, please, please don’t make the first thing people see on your site “Welcome to Site Name Here” and then go into a spiel about how it’s a family run business blah blah blah. Unless it’s brilliantly written, it’s dull to look at, dull to read and smacks of a site run from the garden shed.

Instead, copy the big guns. Use the space to display your products – new stock, customer favourites, your favourites, lifestyle shots of your stock...it’s all good. Highlight offers. Entice people to come through the door with a slideshow of interesting images and easy to click image links to products or categories.

2. Have a search box in your site header

If visitors to your site are looking for something specific, make it easy for them to search for it. Make the search box obvious and clearly visible. If it’s appropriate, add in brand or category selections to allow them to narrow down the search.

3. Write unique and informative product descriptions

It may be quick and easy to copy a manufacturer’s description, but they are rarely written to engage buyers. They’re functional, dull and used by all of your competitors.

Write your own description based on your thoughts of the product. You chose to stock it so it must have caught your imagination or appealed in some way, so try and get this across in your description.

Firebox is an excellent example of how they make product descriptions fun and engaging to read. By the time you’ve finished reading it, you can’t wait to buy it.

4. Don’t hide your add to basket button

Don’t make your add to basket button hard to find. Make it obvious. Make it visible. Make it unmissable!

Many ecommerce software systems put add to basket buttons at the bottom of the product description. This is an instant fail. Make sure the button is in the top ¼ of the page and use a colour that stands out from the background and surrounding info.

5. Use the best product photos you can

Everyone knows the adage ‘a picture says a thousand words’ but it never ceases to amaze me how many sites use tiny, pixelated images that only get worse when you try and view the larger image!

Use large, clear professional images for your products. Try to include a lifestyle shot if you can – having a photo of a person wearing or using the product can help give a sense of size and help the potential customer ‘connect’ with the product.

If your suppliers don’t have professional shots for you to use, take your own. It’s pretty simple to take ‘pack shots’ using a light cocoon and digital camera. The initial investment could mean that you’re able to take photos that no one else has and will set your site apart from others that sell the same products.

6. When writing text copy of any sort, use short snappy sentences and stick to one point per paragraph

It has been said that you should use 75% less text on a website than you would in a brochure. That’s a good rule of thumb. Visitors don’t read online, they scan. Make sure you use bolding to highlight important words or sections and bullet points where appropriate.

7. Use website analytics to see what search phrases convert the best

There’s no excuse for not using analytics. Google Analytics is free and only takes a minute to set up.

Make sure you tell Google Analytics that your site is ecommerce based and ensure that your ecommerce software reports completed sales back to Analytics even if the actual transaction is off-site.

8. Always show delivery costs in the basket

Nothing puts potential customers off purchasing more than unexpected delivery charges. Show your delivery options and costs in the basket and don’t make your customers have to register an account to see them. It’s a sure fire conversion killer. If you charge VAT, make sure that is shown too.

9. Be upfront about returns and exchanges

Trust is the biggest hurdle for etailers to overcome, so it’s a great idea to have your returns policy clearly linked or placed in a tab on the product page.

Allowing customers to see and read a returns policy shows that you a) have one and b) that you are upfront about it.

10. Add a phone number to your header

Having a phone number reassures potential customers that they can actually talk to someone regarding their order. And if a customer is having a problem with a page, product or checking out, it makes it really easy for them to pick up the phone and call.

Congratulations to Heritage Abrasives, a new website that has launched on our systems today.

Congratulations to It Bites, who went live on our system today. Timed to be released at the same time as their brand new album 'Map of the Past'.

 Today we have released version 1.1.6 of the Superia system, another small but useful update.

Here is a full list of the changes that have been made

The following features have been added;

• None

The following modifications have been made;

• Sales - Orders (eLITE Level Upwards) - You can now print an invoice directly from the order screen.
• Store - Delivery (eLITE Level Upwards) - You can't save a delivery method unless you have selected at least one delivery country.

The following fixes have been made;

• None

Congratulations to Smokey Barn, who went live on our system today.

Today we have released version 1.1.5 of the Superia system, only a small update this time, but some really useful functionality for the orders. There have also been a couple of bug fixes.

Here is a full list of the changes that have been made

The following features have been added;

• None

The following modifications have been made;

• Sales - Orders (eLITE level upwards)
  • The despatch note process has been updated, a despatch note will be created each time the quanitity shipped is increased as before, however now you can assign despatch details to each despatch note at any point and send the despatch note individually by email.
  • You can now display orders created between certain dates using the date from/date to fields in the filter.
  • The export option will now reflect the filter that has been applied to the orders list.

The following fixes have been made;

• Sales - Orders (eLITE level upwards) - Fixed a problem with the status filters
• Store - Products (eLITE level upwards) - Fixed a problem with the display filters

Congratulations to One Stop Colour Shop, who went live on our system today.

Congratulations to Mister-Solutions, who went live on our system today. They have come over from EKM as they were experiencing speed problems, they are now much happier with a faster system and website.

Today we have released version 1.1.4 of the Superia system, there have been quite a few alterations and improvements, along with a couple of bug fixes.

Here is a full list of the changes that have been made

The following features have been added;

• Logout Warning - You will now recieve a warning before your session ends to let you know that you will soon be automatically logged out for security reasons, you will then be able to choose to remain logged in for a further 20 minutes.
• Configuration - Payment (eLITE level upwards) - PayPal Website Payments Standard has now been set up as a payment provider.
• Marketing - Promotional Codes (ePRO level upwards) - You can now create promotional codes that can be redeemed at the checkout, promotional codes can apply either monetary or percentage discounts.
• Website - An RSS feed for your blog has been added to your website.

The following modifications have been made;

• Dashboard
  • You can now see a breakdown of your current web space usage, this includes your files, database size and emails.
  • You can now see the top 5 referrers for your website.
  • You can now see the top 5 keywords used to find your website.
• Configuration - General - settings for your RSS feed have been added to the Blog tab.
• Configuration - Payment (eLITE level upwards) - Additional validation has been added to the settings, this should stop any problems with setting up your payments.
• Content - Pages - You can now set a page to be inactive, this will stop users being able to see the page (they will see a 404, page doesn't exist page) and the page will also not appear in your site map.
• Content - 404 Errors - You can now choose to ignore a 404 error so that if it reoccurs you will not be notified about it again.
• Content - Forms
  • You can now set a value for hidden fields.
  • If you use the variable [VISITOR_ID] for the value of a hidden field, this will be replaced with the actual IP address of the person filling out the form.
  • If you use the variable [REFERRING_SITE] for the value of a hidden field, this will be replaced with the URL of the site the user filling out the form was referred from.
• Content - File Manager
  • There is now a resize option on all image files, this will allow you to reduce the size of overly large files.
  • The upload and folder creation options are now always visible so you don't have to keep scrolling to the bottom of the page.
  • You can now order by the field names to more easily find the file you need.
• Sales - Orders (eLITE level upwards) - You can now export your orders to a CSV file.
• Website - Shopping Basket - If there are more products in the basket than there are in stock and back orders is not active then the quantity of the item will be reduced accordingly.

The following fixes have been made;

• Dashboard - Fixed a few calculations errors that occured after the new year.
• Content - Pages - When you duplicate a page a problem has been fixed that may have caused a duplicate URL.
• Content - Navigation - Fixed an error that occured when a product category was selected as a link type for a navigation item when no product categories existed.
• Content - Forms - Hidden fields have now been fixed so that the field header is not visible on the form on the website.
• Content - File Manager
  • A problem has been fixed that caused a folder to appear to be duplicated when a sub folder was created.
  • A problem has been fixed that showed an incorrect filename when a duplicate filename was uploaded.

In the last article I gave a structured approach to writing website copy. If you think your copy could be better, punchier or it’s just lacking something, try applying the following principles to transform your flaccid, dull text into something truly wondrous.

1. It’s Not About You (well, actually it is)

It’s very easy to fall into the trap of text being ‘me/we/us’ based. The people reading your text are only really interested in one person...themselves (it’s all “me, me, me”)! 

Take those me/we/us words and rewrite them so they become you words:

“we have been in business for 20 years”

becomes...

“you can benefit from our years of experience”.

2. It’s All About the Benefits

Talking of benefits – someone once said to me “people don’t buy features...they buy benefits”. And it’s true!

For instance, you might be interested to know that a bicycle has a ’24 speed Deraillieur gears”. You’d be much more interested to know that that you could ‘effortlessly cycle up the steepest hills’.

So take a feature and actually tell people what it will do for them...don’t make them work it out for themselves, because they won’t!

3. Positivity

Try to avoid using negative words in your copy. They might not appear negative but most times they can be re-written in a more positive way. Negative words often start with dis, mis and un.

“In the unfortunate event that your delivery arrives damaged, we aim to avoid disappointment by sending a replacement”

becomes...

“Occasionally deliveries don’t arrive in perfect condition. Don’t worry, just get in touch and we’ll send a replacement out straight away”

4. Detail Detail Detail

Poorly written pages often lack anything meaty...they are vague, waffly and don’t really tell the reader anything. Spice up your content with real information. Dates, times, who, where and how are all great for adding some realism.

“I started roasting coffee beans when I was younger, making coffee for family members.”

becomes...

“I was just 12 years old when I started roasting real Arabica coffee beans. My Grandpa Joe knew when it was time to finish in the garage when the unmistakable smell of freshly roasted coffee would waft out of the kitchen window.”

5. Don’t Be a 7 Stone Weakling

A lot of copy is weak because it tries to sound clever, posh or worse still, it falls into that awful trap of ‘marketese, corporate gobbledegook’. You know that stuff...you understand all of the words on the page, but none of it makes any sense or tells you anything!

Use simple, direct words. Often the worst offenders are words ending in ‘tion’ so keep an eye out for those.

“If there are any points on which you require explanation or further particulars we shall be glad to furnish such additional details as may be required by telephone.”

becomes...

“If you have any questions, please call.”

The Plain English Campaign has loads of useful information including the A-Z of Alternative Words.

6. Personality

How your page reads is in part down to the personality you give it. You can manufacture a personality for your copy based on how you want your site to be perceived. Innocent Drinks are a great example of a company that has a friendly, almost quirky corporate personality.

An extract from their ‘Us’ page:

The idea was to make it easy for people to do themselves some good. And to make it taste nice too. We wanted people to think of innocent drinks as their one healthy habit; like going to the gym, but without the communal shower afterwards.

That may be too chatty and quirky for your company. The point is to think about how you want to be perceived and write accordingly.

7. Break it up

Finally use bold and italic text to emphasise key sections of your page. Use it to highlight the really juicy nuggets of copy you really want people to read. Don’t use underlines as links are often underlined and this just confuses people. Depending on the styling of your site you might want to use brighter colours or highlighter style backgrounds, to draw attention to specific words or sentences...use it sparingly though otherwise it can look pretty garish.

Pull quotes can really break up a page – ask your friendly neighbourhood website designer to style a few for your page. They may even be able to offer some advice on images which might reinforce your message or story.

It's worth mentioning that all of the advice and tips here can be used in emails, letters, brochures, sales pitches, social media etc.

If you run an ecommerce site or webshop, you can apply all these principles to product descriptions. Having a great product description can seriously boost conversion rates. If you’d like some inspiration take a look at Firebox who have always written engaging, salesy descriptions which make it a fun and enjoyable experience browsing the site.

Happy writing!
 

A tweet from one of our customers prompted me to write this article. I replied with a few tips on writing website content and thought it would be useful to write up a full article as I know that even writing one page can be a daunting prospect.

Getting Started

Most people struggle just to get out of the starting blocks. Often, the easiest way to start is just to note down the key bullet points of what you want to say or what the page needs to cover and if you want the reader to take action, what that action is (buy, call, subscribe, go to another page, get a quote etc).

Think about:

• who
• what
• where
• how
• when
   

Fill in the Blanks

Once you’ve got the core information, start to fill in the blanks and flesh it out. I often find it’s easier to write as if you’re talking to a friend...it’s a more natural way to write and tends to flow better.

Don’t be afraid to edit as you go but don’t get bogged down either, it’s often better to just move on. You might find that it’s easier to reword it later or you might just lose that bit altogether. Writing also tends to get easier as you get into it.

Try to stick to one point per paragraph and use subheadings to give instant visual clues as to what the page is about.

The F Word

Actually it’s not really about a word – it’s about the letter. In a Jakob Neilsen study, they discovered that people tend to read or scan a page in an F shape. They read the heading or sub heading and some of the first paragraph, then they tend to scan to halfway across the page (the shorter bar of the F) and then, if they are interested, they scan down the left hand side.

So what does this mean to you?

It means you should put your main, most important information in that first paragraph and as mentioned above, use sub headings to provide visual clues as to what the content is about further down the page.

On that point, try to use headings rather than questions, for example:

“How do you roast your coffee beans?” would be better as “The Coffee Roasting Process”
“How do I pay online?” would be better as “Payment”

Erase and Rewind

If you haven’t been editing as you’ve been going along, it’s now time to start at the top and give it a good scrub. Well polished text reads effortlessly and engages the reader, even if the copy may be technical or heavy going.

Go through your text and be brutal...if it doesn’t add anything, take it out or rewrite it so it does. It often helps to read your website copy out loud. Keep editing until you think it’s right.

Check the spelling and grammar - don’t trust Word to do it for you!

In the next article I’ll go through 7 ways you can improve any website content, direct mail, email, sales pitch, brochure content etc.

A new template is available - 'Vintage' harks back to days gone by. The design draws inspiration from old French postcards, antique jewellery and vintage patterns. The colouring is soft and uses an elegant script font - we think it's a great look for shabby chic crafts and gifts as well as vintage / retro clothing or jewellery.

To see how it would look on your site, just click Configuration > Templates and press the preview icon for the Vintage template.

Congratulations to Capsule Wardrobe, a new website that has launched on our system today.

A new template is available - 'Rockstyle' uses a dark granite background and transparent sections to create a cool, modern look to sites. The textured dark background really sets off the product images. We think it’s a perfect choice for sites selling clothing, jewellery and watches but would work equally well for biking, outdoors, climbing related sites.

To see how it would look on your site, just click Configuration > Templates and press the preview icon for the Rockstyle template.

Today we have released version 1.1.3 of the Superia system, there have been quite a few alterations and improvements, along with a couple of bug fixes.

Here is a full list of the changes that have been made

The following modifications have been made;

• Sitewide - A number of layout changes have been made to the system.
• Configuration - Templates - You can now preview a template even if its not the default template by clicking the corresponding preview button.
• Configuration - General - Store - You can now set a BCC email for outgoing despatch emails, this will send a copy of the despatch email to that specific email address.
• Configuration - Layouts - The layouts are now laid out into easily understandable graphical representations of how the layout will look so you can easily select the appropriate layout.
• Store - Delivery - The region selection for the delivery methods has now changed to reflect the regions and taxes selection, so you can now more easily select your delivery destinations.
• Store - Categories
  • You can now overwrite the page style settings for a category, once you have done this you can set a seperate template, layout and apply a panel style to the category page for that specific category.
  • You can now assign and unassign products to the product category directly from the category editor.
  • You can now set the page title, meta description and meta keywords for a category which will overwrite the page meta tags if used.
  • You can now set the onload values and additional head information for a specific category page which will overwrite the page advanced values if used.
• Store - Brands
  • You can now set a brand page image to show at the top of the brand page, this will overwrite the brand title.
  • You can now enter text to appear both before the brand results and after the brand results.
  • You can now overwrite the page style settings for a brand, once you have done this you can set a seperate template, layout and apply a panel style to the brand page.
  • You can now set the page title, meta description and meta keywords for a brand which will overwrite the page meta tags if used.
  • You can now set the onload values and additional head information for a specific brand page which will overwrite the page advanced values if used.
• Content - Panels
  • The additional styling of the panel has been brought in line with the changes that have been made to the templates.
  • You can now set the onload values and additional head information for a specific panel.

The following fixes have been made;

• Template - Products
  • Fixed a problem that was occuring when setting up product thumbnail dividers
  • Fixed a problem that was occuring when saving a new template
• Website - PayPal Express Checkout - Fixed a problem that was occuring when a product description had an ampersand in the name.
• Directory - Listings - Fixed a problem that was not allowing listings to be deleted.

Today we have released version 1.1.2 of the Superia system, there have been quite a few alterations and improvements.

Here is a full list of the changes that have been made

The following modifications have been made;

• Sitewide - A number of layout changes have been made to the system.
• Configuration - General - The Configuration > Customers section has now been moved into a tab within Configuration > General
• Configuration - Email - The email and signature settings have been moved from Configuration > General to Configuration > Email.
• Configuration - Templates
  • An overhaul to how the fonts are set within the template, hopefully this will make the template a lot easier to use and cut down on the amount of options within the template so it doesn't look as daunting to a first time user.
  • In the header section you can now easily place either a text logo or an image.

Today we have released version 1.1.1 of the Superia system, there have been quite a few alterations and improvements.

Here is a full list of the changes that have been made

The following modifications have been made;

• Content - Panels
  • The position option has now been removed from the panels options, each panel will now automatically be added to all columns
  • A new panel will now automatically be made active, these panels will be added to each column in your layouts but will remain inactive until made active manually in each layout
  • Latest Products - A new panel style has been added for product type panels which will automatically show products that have been recently added to the site
  • Upcoming Products - A new panel style has been added for product type panels which will automatically show products that are coming soon, where the release date is in the future

Today we have released version 1.1.0 of the Superia system, there have been some new features added, quite a few alterations and improvements, as well as a few bug fixes.

Here is a full list of the changes that have been made

The following features have been added;

• Configuration - General - Social - you can now set up social links to display on your blog articles
  • Facebook has been added
  • Twitter has been added
  • Google +1 has been added
  • LinkedIn has been added
• Content - Blog Categories - You can now create blog categories to place your articles in
• Content - Blog
  • Main - Set the options for the article as well as the article content itself
  • Categories - Choose which blog categories to assign your article to
  • Social - Select which social links to show on the article
  • Comments - manage the comments that have been left for this article
  • SEO - set the meta data for the article
  • Advanced - advanced options to set the header values and the onload values for the article page.
• Content - Panels - There is now a panel for blog categories to place in your layout.

The following modifications have been made;

• Configuration - Regions & Tax
  • The page has been totaly revamped, it should now be a lot easier to select your regions and to set the tax values.
  • You can now set a default European tax rate, default United States tax rate and a default Rest Of World tax rate as well as an overall default tax rate, any selected regions that do not have a tax rate will use the next available default value up the hierarchy.
• Configuration - Templates - The template has been updated, some fields have been moved around for ease of use and a new blog tab has been added so you can style your blog articles.
• Content - News - The news page has now been replaced with a blog page

The following fixes have been made;

• None

Congratulations to Studio37, a new website that has launched on our systems today.

Congratulations to WhiteRabbit Creative, a new website that has launched on our systems today.

Congratulations to UGlow Skincare, a new website that has launched on our systems today.

Some great news for all of our customers - our prices are going down! Our maxiCMS and eLITE, ePRO and eXPERT ecommerce software solutions are dropping to £10, £20, £35 and £50 per month respectively, saving our customers up to £120 per year.

There will be no drop in quality of service or lack of new features though.

It's official - Superia is the new name! From the 22nd July 2011 Breeze Commerce Limited will be known as Superia Commerce Limited. Whilst we'd had the name Breeze for some time, it is unfortunately not a name that we could trademark and therefore build a brand on. We wanted a name that was not shared by any other companies in our industry and there are a handful of web design agencies that use Breeze in their name or products. 

The new name, Superia, reflects our aims to make the most efficient, flexible and user friendly content management and ecommerce system around. It took around 3 months to decide on the new name. We generated close to 100 company names and through a process of checking them off against the trademark register and some thorough Google searches, we settled on Superia. The trademark application is going through, it should be resolute in a couple of weeks time.

We’ll soon be re-branding the website and admin panel. The effective date for the name change is 22nd July 2011 – from this date all correspondence will use the Superia Commerce Limited name.

There will be no change in management and we will still be providing the same great products and service. 

Congratulations to Simply Electric, a new website that has launched on our systems today.

Congratulations to Saiba Beauty, a new website that has launched on our systems today.

Congratulations to Advent Advocacy, a new website that has launched on our systems today.

Congratulations to Solihull Natural Health Group, a new website that has launched on our systems today.

Congratulations to The Cleaning Queen, a new website that has launched on our systems today.

Congratulations to Alison Watkiss, a new website that has launched on our systems today.

Congratulations to Swimcam, a new website that has launched on our systems today.

Congratulations to Woollybobs, a new website that has launched on our systems today.

Congratulations to Conservatory Solar Control, a new website that has launched on our systems today.

Congratulations to Cardzilla, a new website that has launched on our systems today.

Congratulations to The Easy Guide, a new website that has launched on our systems today.

Congratulations to Lifton Hall Hotel, a new website that has launched on our systems today.