Bysoft Blog

To avoid the pitfalls of a site design that is too confusing, too ugly, or too experimental to be effective, the ecommerce site owner must strike a balance between leading-edge techniques and technologies, effectiveness, and aesthetics. So, in this article of “Web Design Tips” we will outline the laws for ecommerce site navigation design based on our projects experience to help any ecommerce business.

Law No. 1: Make Navigation Easy to Understand and Use

Shoppers browsing to an ecommerce store don’t want to be baffled by navigation. Make your site navigation easy to understand and use. Provide clear labels that explain what a user will find when he or she clicks. If you sell trousers, try labels like “Men’s Trousers” or “Women’s Trousers” or “GIORDANO” And put navigation in a predictable place, top, left, right, or front and center.

Law No. 2: Make Navigation Accessible

Making your ecommerce site easy for customers with disabilities is good for business and the right thing to do. Some of your customers are going to have disabilities that require them to surf the web using screen readers, refreshable Braille displays, magnifiers, or other helpful devices. One technique to try is to place text-based navigation and skip links (often hidden from most site visitors via CSS) at the very top of the page.

Law No. 3: Tell Me Where I Am

Before customers can make a good choice about where they want to go on your site, they should know where they are. Because so many online shoppers use search engines to locate online stores, your customers can enter your site just about anywhere. So there is no guarantee that they are starting on the home page. Use visual and text clues (i.e., breadcrumbs) to show the customer where he or she is on your site.

Law No. 4: Use Layers and Facets on Big Sites

If your ecommerce site has more than a few product categories, more than a handful of brands, or more than a dozen products, add navigation layers and facets. As a customer, He/she wants to be able to browse by brand, price, age-appropriateness, color, or just about any other relevant product attribute. Your navigation should let me do that right in place.

Law No. 5: Let There Be Search

Every ecommerce site should allow shoppers to just search for products. Not a lot of explanation needed. Add a search box to every page on your site to let shoppers search the products that they concerned. It is also a form of navigation.

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There is nothing to stop the popular pace of open-source solution. Once upon a time, open source is only a foundation framework and development tools, and now it has quickly infiltrated the enterprise environment in every corner. With the development of open source and the strong increase in user acceptance, it brings enterprise the advantages such as quality, reliability, transparency, low cost, as well as interoperability. Especially in today’s financial crisis, companies are careful calculation and strict budgeting, which in this field of e-commerce, entrepreneurs are more clearly selecting open source solutions to reduce in-house application development cost. Although IT budgets are shrinking anywhere between 5 to 25 percent, IT e-commerce organizations are expected to sharpen the online shopping experiences of their companies’ customers.

As we know, whether in business-to-consumer or business-to-business e-commerce, as customers are exposed to new capabilities, they expect those at all other websites. E-commerce firms should turn to commercial, off-the-shelf, or open source software as a replacement for current custom web development initiatives to save up to 35 per cent of their ongoing maintenance and licence costs, Gartner advised in its report “Cost Cutting in E-Commerce, 2009″.

The report identified five interesting tips in which IT leaders in charge of e-commerce operations.

In particular, IT departments shouldn’t invest on creating their own applications for basic e-commerce functions, since those can be implemented at a lower cost through commercial “off-the-shelf” software.

In the case of rich Internet applications (RIAs), the custom development work should be limited to those applications that will generate high sales conversion rates. And leverage established community websites, rather than building communities in the site. A company’s e-commerce developers should be focused on building the types of made-to-measure applications that will give the company an edge over its competition.

The report also advised e-commerce firms to extract more return on investment (ROI) from technology they already have deployed. Such a move could decrease costs of service, sales, and marketing by 15 percent for large businesses and 10 percent for small businesses in 2009 and 10 percent in subsequent years.

IT departments should be merciless when dealing with their e-commerce software vendors and aim to lower their 2009 license fees from 20 percent to 50 percent.

Finally, IT managers need to take stock of their e-commerce staff to see if there are employees elsewhere doing the same tasks, such as separate marketing people for online and offline operations, in which case the work can be consolidated and personnel reduced.

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May this greeting card express all our sincere wishes for you in the New Year. Happiness, Achievements and Success for the year of the Earth Ox!

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Thanks for your great support and trust during the past years. As always, it is our great pleasure to work for you and wish you a happy and prosperous year of 2009.

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Bysoft held an lecture on open source application on web in Oct./23/2008. Our aim is to let more and more people know the open source solution.

- IT technology introduction

-Open source language introduction

LAMP

Java

Delphi

-LAMP introduction

-LAMP in advanced application

-PHP framework

oscommerce

magento

Joomla

Spip

PHP + Flex

ezpublish

-Q&A

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In this topic, you may find Standard development workflow/Prepare working environment/Layout comprehension/Introduce Block/Understand header and footer elements
design-integration-guideline.pdf

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It supports SOAP and XML-RPC and provides access directly to customers, orders and product catalog.

An introduction to the API: http://www.magentocommerce.com/wiki/doc/webservices-api/introduction

We expect this API for months. Now, we can integrate Magento with all professional third-party applications that revolve around an ecommerce site (ERP, CRM, Logistics, etc. ..)

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Bysoft became one of the official partners of Magento last week.
Website:http://www.magentocommerce.com
Download:http://www.magentocommerce.com/download

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Baidu Relaunches In Japan

Baidu JapanBaidu aims to take on Google and Yahoo in Japan from Reuters reports Baidu has relaunched in Japan at http://www.baidu.jp/. The press release called the launch a “formal launch of its Japanese language search engine.”

As part of this launch, Baidu revamped the Japanese home page and added blog search. Baidu currently holds a 70-percent market share in China and hopes to replicate that success in Japan. You can see the comparison between the Baidu’s main site in China and the new Baidu Japan site by logging the homepage.

Robin Li, Baidu’s chairman and CEO, said:

We are very excited to officially enter the Japanese search market. With Baidu’s strengths in developing user-focused Chinese language search and the qualified team we have on the ground in Japan, and given the success we have already encountered after nearly one year of testing our beta site, we are confident that we can provide a high quality Japanese language search engine.

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