Every business wants to increase sales. You can increase sales by selling
more to existing customers and also by acquiring new customers. Acquiring new
customers is not easy. One important element is to get in front of prospects.
The more people get to see you, the better your chances of making a sale.
How do we get in front of more prospects? By showing up where the customers
are?
Shopping Portal Command Center
What does that mean? In the conventional marketplace, a business’s chances of
success are better in malls or streets with high foot traffic. The same thing in
the online world. You need to have a presence where the customers are.
Where do shoppers congregate online? Some people prefer to use search engines
to find the products and services they need. Others frequent shopping portals
where hundreds and thousands of merchants have their wares on display. For
example, ebay, Amazon, Rakuten etc. There are about a dozen such shopping
portals.
If you have just a few products, listed them on multiple shopping portals is
not a big deal. But if you have hundreds and thousands of products, it can
become a very time consuming process and will drain your resources. Products
change daily, so does stock on hand and prices. Trying to keep your products
updated on so many sites is tough – very tough. That’s where we come in to the
rescue.
We have developed a ‘Shopping Portals Command Center (SPCC) ‘ that puts you
in control. The SPCC downloads all product data from your e-commerce system /
shopping cart and creates data feeds. These data feeds are then uploaded to the
various shopping portals. You are in total control. If on certain dates, you
don’t want to uploade data feeds to the portals, you don’t upload them. If you
only want to upload to select sites, you may do so.
Can’t remember when you uploaded data, the SPCC remembers. You need to make
portal specific notes for reference? SPCC provides you a field for your own
internal notes.
Are we the only ones offering such a service? No. There are others doing the
same but for larger companies. Most such services are targeted towards bigger
companies and range in price from $700 to $1500 / month. At Interloper, Inc., we
have our focus on small and mid sized businesses and our services are priced
accordingly.
The ‘Shopping Portals Command Center (SPCC) ‘ is priced at $695. It is a one
time charge. We custom install it for each client. We map your database to all
the shopping portals you are interested in then put you in command.
To order, call us or fill out the contact form and we can send you an
invoice.
The emphasis is on the overall customer experience. The objective of an innovative design is not to get high marks from critics but to enhance the customer experience. There must be a balance between design elegance and simplicity, between form and function.
Design is an art form. The nuts and bolts of a website are pure science. When you blend the two, the result is an engaging website, easy to use, and above all, contributes to your bottom line.
Sometimes a very simple site or subset of a site delivers far better results than a complex artistic site. For example, we advised a computer company to build a black and white configurator and that has generated them in millions of dollars of sales besides being a go-to resource for computer techies and even their competitors. See http://www.interloper.com/mbsearch.php
When we talk about web design what do we mean? Is it about the looks of the site? Is it
about the form of the site? And what should it be? Should it be really good
looking, colorful and splashy? Is that what matters – the looks of the site?
Do looks matter?
It’s pretty much the same as an ad you see on television. You come across some ads that are really humorous
with good looking in nice surroundings and you enjoy watching it. But did that
Ad move you to action? Did you pick up the phone and call? Do you get up and go to the dealership or to the store to buy what they were
selling? Is that Ad going to make you a customer or not? Same thing on the web, the medium is different, objective
is the same.
The design of your website should be such that leads you to action, and that action is different for
different organizations. If you are a charity, you want people to donate either time or money.
If you are an E-commerce site, you want people to buy what you are selling. If it is
an informational site you want to reinforce beliefs or thoughts. Some sites of
course are of a different nature like news site or entertainment site where the objective
is to make people linger so that the more time they spend, the more money you generate from the
Ads that you show on your site. But on most other sites, the objective is to make you take action, and that action
determines the effectiveness of web design. Sometimes there is no easy answer so
you go with multiple designs and then do A/B testing to figure out what appeals to your target market.
Should you change colors; would red lead to action? Should a restaurant website
have more red? Should a physician’s website have pasetls only?
Non-Profits:
What about Masjid or a Church or a Temple, what will make people donate more?
Quite often there is no easy answer. Instead of imposing a design on you, we
work with you to come up with a design that is just right for you. We want the design to reflect your personality
or your organization’s personality and also be in line with your customer expectations. For example, if your strength is price, we must not design a site that looks like
a better fit for Fifth Avenue, as that would drive customers away.
Target Market:
Website design should be in line with your target audience. If your target market is teenagers, that should be reflected in the
design, if your market is seniors, you should be more mindful of what appeals to
senior and what they find comfotable. Sometimes it’s just as simple as a bigger
font that makes it easy for them to read. Good design should be in line with your organization’s personality as well as your target audiences.
Sales Pages/Squeeze Pages:
Some of our best sales generating pages have been the ugliest. They were designed to generate a specific action and they did.
It is especially true on squeeze pages or pages that are designed for single action, either you signup or you don’t. It’s
beautiful if it delivers results.
The most sensitive market to layout, colors and form is the female market. Women love and appreciate colors, cuts, curves and
pictures.
Blog Design:
Blogs are very personal in nature. They should reflect you. If you have a
spartan personality, it would be best to take a minimalistic approach. If your general personality is very conservational, then we should design a blog that’s a very open it encourages discussion.
Blog Design
Logo Design:
One of the most subjective areas is logo design. Everybody wants a great logo. But nobody knows how to define a great logo. What is a great logo? It is some image in
a person’s mind that is hard to translate. Beauty is in the eye of the beholder
and that is very true about logos. We quite often ended up designing 10, 20, 25 different logos to come up with a logo
that the client likes.
Give and Take between looks and functionality:
We also have to pay heed to other functions like hardware resources,
bandwidth, storage and SEO. For example should we use Flash? In Flash you can do
pretty much anything. You can have characters moving around in really animated screens. But Flash requires
stronger servers and greater bandwidth and flash sites are not overly friendly towards SEO though the nature of SEO has changed so much that
we don’t know how much that is important anymore.
Conventional or Responsive design:
Should we design for conventional computer screens? Or should we incorporate a responsive designs?
Responsive design is one that looks good on smart phones and tablets as well as a conventional computer screens.
All over the world more and more people are interacting with the web using
mobile devices and web design has to take that into consideration. Our job is to
make it easy for customers to interact with you.
Backend design:
Our approach towards designing a front end user interface (UI) is very different than designing the backend for you, your administrators, your data entry personnel, your sales people
etc. When we are designing a backend, our focus is on speed, economy and functionality. For example,
for your data entry staff we want to design an interface that involves the least
number of key strokes – improves productivity. For your accountant, we want to
provide all the numerical detail that he needs, preferably exportable in
spreadsheet format so he can look at the data every which way.
API’s can be used to import product data feeds for upload to shopping
portals. Saves massive data entry for large sites. For EDI, whether XML or
conventional API, the end result is efficiency and accuracy.
We believe that a good design starts with the end result in mind. A spectacular design is wasted effort
if the visitor does not do what you want him to do?
We can help you plan every detail from the color scheme to the placement of call to action buttons, to screen layout, to navigation, social media
integration, info graphs and all that.
During the design process, our approach is;
To understand your business
To create a wire frame
To create a mockup with a responsive design in mind
To create the PSD
Slice the PSD into HTML5/CSS3
Hand it over to development
Design challenges:
As designers, we are always faced with a challenge. What tools and creatives
deliver the best results. Should we use flash? Flash is a great tool but off
late Jquery has taken over because Jquery is not that resource intensive, is
adaptable to mobile devices and it’s great for sliders.
For landing pages, should we have a square grid style design or a parallax
accordion style? Should we create info graphics? Should we add videos? How many videos?
Should we have big sliders, small sliders, secondary sliders, footers, headers, sidebars, columns, all that is taken into consideration to create
one wholesome website.
So how can we help you?
Fill up the contact form or pick up the phone and call us. Let’s talk.
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