The Art of Re-Cart: Stop Losing Potential Online Sales
April 28, 2007
If you run an ecommerce store you may or may not be familiar with the idea of a “re-cart”. As it sounds a “re-cart” is the function of the ecommerce shopping cart that contacts potiential customers that used the shopping cart on your site but never completed a transaction. No one likes the idea that you are losing sales but it is common place in life that sales sometimes do not happen. Have you ever been in a grocery store and seen a shopping cart that had eggs, milk, cereal and other goodies that someone had left behind? Of course you have but the one difference is that you cannot email your customer in a grocery store when they abandon their shopping cart and ask them why they didn’t finish their weekly grocery shopping but in the ecommerce world, you can!
Most shopping carts now do not have the option of a re-cart module because most are made by third-party vendors and developers that work with specific shopping cart frameworks like osCommerce, X-Cart, etc.
Re-Cart modules on the market today…
DataLinks Software Solutions (DLSS)
This module is specifically for use with the EcommerceTemplates framework. It retails for $25 USD (not including installation). It features the ability to return to an online store and continue shopping with a cart that was abandoned.
Not a lot of developers have public modules available for sale but if you are running an online store it is a module that will help you grow sales through catching the lost sales opportunities. If you happen to know of any others feel free to add them in the comments section below.
Luc
ClickDensity: Helping you makes your web pages more useable
April 24, 2007
I was thumbing through a site I frequent when I found and read an article about this online service called “ClickDensity.” I figured it was another piece of analytics software like Google Analytics but what really interested me when I got to the site was that it has a lot to do with user behavior and while it has some analytics the core of the product is user behavior oriented showing things like Heat Maps, a click map and a hover map.
Like I said it’s got some analytics power but it really does well with tracking user behavior. Google Analytics does not have any heat mapping features built in just yet but I could see them adding something like this down the road. If you are looking for an application to help you learn about what your users are doing visually then check out the ClickDensity site. They have put together a simple demo that showcases the types of features you can implement on your site. Just click here and check it out for yourself.
Luc
MochiKit: making AJAX and JavaScript suck less
April 16, 2007
Because AJAX is taking off many Developers are releasing their own Libraries. I’ve written about the Scripta.lico.us Library a while ago but I’ve recently stumbled onto Mochikit. Mochikit is a simplified JavaScript that houses custom functions like Sortable Tables, Draggable Objects, and a Color Wheel that shows visualization for CSS3 by hue, saturation, and luminance. This AJAX library is definitely worth a look because it’s simple and well documented.
Luc
The Sales Funnel Continues
April 15, 2007
Since reading Yaro’s first Sales Funnel Article he has written 2 follow up articles. In the first article he explains and introduces the concept of a “Sales Funnel”, what it is and what it is supposed to do to help you in your business.
The second article in gets in depth about the “Front-End” or the face to the customer and talks about it at length and the third article discusses the Back-end of the sales funnel which with the right creativity is where companies who succeed make most of their money through areas like playing with your pricing points, filtering prospects and things of that nature.
Part 1: The Sales Funnel Explained
Part 2: Generating Leads on the Front End
I’d encourage you to read these three articles because they are well written and well give you ideas that you can apply to your own online business plans.
Luc
BittBox: One Hot Graphic Developer Resource
April 14, 2007
I’ve got to say that since I ran into the site, BittBox, back in January I am amazing at what this guy (or girl) is doing. The free resources and step by step tutorials he (or she) offers are awesome, clear and simple to understand. Unlike other “Tutorial” or “Free” based sites this one is surprisingly simple, clean and easy to navigate. I keep coming back every few weeks to see what’s been going on and it never fails to amaze me that BittBox just out does itself with each new article. If you play around in Photoshop or Illustrator then you will want to check out this site and bookmark it for future reference.
Luc
