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Dragnet Systems has launched its newest online store for Hennessy Cycles in Fermoy, Cork - http://www.hennessycycles.com. This new store is designed to help Hennessy Cycles race ahead of their competition and offer their customers something a bit different from the usual online bike stores.

Hennessy Cycles will deliver throughout Ireland and UK. Irish deliveries are free. UK orders over €50 will also get free delivery which is fantastic.

It's great to see such a fresh take on the design for our stores, which to date have typically had white backgrounds. I think the darker design really works with the images used on the site. Unfortunately I didn't have any input into this project as it was handled by others in our team but I thought the finished product turned out so well I had to blog about it. Go Team Dragnet! *ahem*

It's a new year and thankfully the work inside in Dragnet Systems shows no signs of slowing down. VGWines.com is a brand new online store for an existing wine retailer based in Kerry, Vanilla Grape Wines Ltd.

The store uses Dragnet Systems own online store software. We have rebuilt the front end engine to make it easier for our in-house designers to build templates for any new stores going forward. It will also help increase the speed at which we can build new stores for clients now which is fantastic news.

It was interesting to note that due to legal issues with selling alcohol online VGWines.com can only sell to Irish consumers. This is the first time one of our stores has been faced with such a restriction but it makes sense. As always Rebecca has done a fantastic job with the design of the site and it definitely has a perfect 'wine' mood about it. I'm getting thirsty just looking at it :)

It might be the first day of December but that hasn't stop us from launching 2 new websites to get our December releases off to a great start! Aquatech Ireland have launched 2 new online stores and a brochure site to open up their products to customers all around the world. Aquatech.ie are one of Irelands leading suppliers of renewable energy systems and alternative heating solutions. With renewable energy on everyone's lips at the moment I'm sure they will do very well for themselves. TheHeatingWarehouse.co.uk is a sister site of aquatech specifically targeting the UK market. This site isn't live just yet but should be launched in the next few days. The PolarBear.ie brochure site is a nice little springboard site to links to both of these new stores.

Over the coming weeks we have loads of new and exciting sites launching including a new online clothing store for Clintons, a new online wine store for Vanilla Grape Wines, the new redesigned City Gate Mahon and much more. My blog has suffered a bit due to two massive projects that I am currently working on. I'll have more details on this work closer to launch but I've been learning loads about Google Maps and highly scalable server setups as a result of these projects. Fun times :D

Dragnet Systems has just launched one of our newest online stores - thereallygoodsoapcompany.ie. This online store features a brand new fully featured Wholesaler section as well as all the existing functionality of our store software. This new section will let the website owners manage wholesalers, add specific wholesaler products and even control the pricing per wholesaler for shared products.

This site also contains a fully content managed news section and a fully integrated newsletter system. The site benefits from having some really nice, professionally done, product imaging. Some of these items look good enough to eat! Although I wouldn't recommend it ;)

I really like the design work our lead designer Rebecca managed to pull off on this site. It really is a gorgeous site to look at and go through. I'd like to wish all at The Really Good Soap Company the best going forward with their new store. As well as having a .ie domain site they have also registered thereallygoodsoapcompany.com to appeal to a wider market as they will ship worldwide. I'm sure they will have loads of orders over the next few weeks as the online Christmas shopping kicks off!

If you haven't already looked into using the jquery UI calendars, you really should! One of my latest projects, www.hertzflydrive.com, uses these calendars on the homepage. They are quick to setup and offer loads of options that make them very flexible for anyone looking to use date pickers on their forms.

One of the most common setups is to use two calendars to let users pick 'From - To' dates. Placing two textboxes and setting them up to use the calendars is easy (and for this post I am assuming you can at least do that much) but what if we only want our second calendar to only allow the user to select dates on or after the date entered in the first calendar?

Well the good news is that this is easy to do using a custom function that is called before the calendar is displayed to the end user. The script below shows the jQuery for setting up two calendars on your form and the custom function to ensure that the dates the end user selects on the second calendar are either after today's date or after the value entered in our 'From' calendar.

jQuery - save as calendar-config.js in a folder called scripts:

$().ready(function() {
    $('.pUpDate, .dOffDate').datepicker({
        numberOfMonths: 2,
        showButtonPanel: true,
        beforeShow: customRange,
        dateFormat: 'dd-mm-yy',
        showOn: 'both',
        buttonImage: 'images/calendar-icon.gif',
        buttonImageOnly: true,
        buttonText: 'Show Date Picker'
    });
});
function customRange(a) {
    var b = new Date();
    var c = new Date(b.getFullYear(), b.getMonth(), b.getDate());
    if (a.id == 'DropoffDate') {
        if ($('.pUpDate').datepicker('getDate') != null) {
            c = $('.pUpDate').datepicker('getDate');
        }
    }
    return {
        minDate: c
    }
}

The custom range function above should be self explanatory. We pass in the id of the element we clicked on (i.e. which textbox we're currently in) and if that textbox is the drop-off textbox we want to set the min date to be the value entered in the Pick-up textbox, assuming it has a value.

HTML:

    
     
    
    
    
    
    



    Pick-up Date
    

    Drop-off Date
    

To help you get started you can download a working example of this demo here - min date jquery demo.zip (67.37 kb). To view it in action head over to hertzflydrive.com.

So you've invested loads of time and money building up your online store and you're ready to launch....now what? How can you get people to go to your site? How can you keep customers coming back for more?

I have been building online stores for customers for over 5 years now and it's always easy to spot the ones that will do well and the ones that will fail. Below is a Top 10 guide for making sure you do everything you can to make your online store the best it can be. These tips are not in any order but they are things that every store owner should be doing to make their online stores a success.

Give proper product descriptions - If there is one major falling point for online stores it's the lack of being able to physically touch the item you want to buy. To help your customers know if the item they are looking at is what they want make sure to put in the time to fill out the product description. If you're selling a jacket don't just put in 'navy jacket with pockets' as the description. Flesh it out. Describe the material used, any logo or brand names, the quality of the build, what the inside of the jacket is like, inner pockets, etc. Show customers more than one image, allow them to zoom in on the images for a closer look, etc. This particular point will make or break your store. Trust me, if you take away one point out of my list make sure it's this one!

Keep your store up to date - This might sounds like a no brainer but there is nothing worse than a store (or website) that isn't kept up to date. If there are items with no stock then either hide them from your store or put up a notice informing customers when the items will be back in stock. If your store has a news page on it then be sure to keep that up to date. Simple news posts to let potential customers know when you have new items for sale is a perfect way to use that section of your site. You don't need to write pages and pages of text but it gives people confidence that someone is looking after this store and keeping it up to date.

Offer free postage - There's nothing worse than an online store you know is only up the road but is charging you €10 to ship your items to you! Doing something as simple as offering freepost to customers is a brilliant way to make them feel like they're not being ripped off. If it's not economical to ship out smaller items for free, make it an incentive to customers to spend more on your store buy offering freepost for orders over a certain amount. This particular method of 'freepost' works great as the customer is rewarded with freepost for spending more money on your store. Win/Win!

Keep customers informed of their orders at all times - I have mentioned this in some of my previous posts on how to run online stores so it should come as no surprise to my regular readers that I am sticking this point in my top 10 list. If I order items from your site then I expect at the very least to get an order confirmation from your site telling me that you received my order. It's very good practice to then follow up that email within 24hrs to let me know if my order has shipped or if you're waiting on stock. Communication is key for any online store to succeed. The better communication you give your customers the more they will buy from you and the more chances there are of them telling their friends how great your store is.

Don't hide your contact details from your customers - I've seen a few online stores lately that don't provide any means of contact besides an online form. This isn't good enough if it's all you have on your online store. Give your customers a phone number or an actual email address they can use as well as your online form. Clearly display your company registration number. The more contact details you can give to customers the more they will be willing to hand over their money on your site. Just like I mentioned on the second point, it's all about giving your customers the confidence to spend money on your site.

Give customers a few payment options - A lot of the main web stores out there do this and I think it's a great idea. Let people pay you the way they want to. There is nothing worse than a web store that uses a crappy 'no name' payment portal. If you are taking money on your site then clearly display the payment provider being used. Let customers pay by credit card through your payment provider if they wish or offer PayPal/Google Checkout as an alternative. I would normally use my credit card for online transactions but sometimes if I'm on a website that I have never used before I like using PayPal instead as it keeps my credit card details hidden. If you offer multiple payment options then you're making it easier for customers to pay you. This is an important topic when you consider the high volumes of users who get as far as the checkout pages only to abandon their goods because they couldn't remember their credit card number or its expiry date. If you offered PayPal or Google Checkout then you might have made that sale.

Make sure your site is easy to navigate - This isn't a big deal if you've only got about 5 products but let's face it, you want to sell as much as you can. A lot of online stores let customers navigate items by departments. This is done for obvious reasons. It's easier for the customer to work his/her way through your store by department rather than to go trawling through hundreds of items on a page. Don't mess things up by putting products into departments they don't belong in. Spend the time to organise your store based on customer viewing habits. If you have a good web site stat package for your store you can easily see what product pages are doing best. You can then set up a new department called 'Popular Items' that lists all of those products to help make it quicker for potential customers to get at your best selling items.

Embrace social media sites - YouTube, Facebook, Twitter...you just can't get away from them. Everyone is on them. Make sure that your store makes it easy for product details to be sent to friends on those sites. Set up a profile on Twitter or Facebook and put links to those profile pages on your store home page. This brings me nicely onto my next tip.

Run special offers - A great way to get people to follow you on Facebook or Twitter is to offer your followers a promotion code. Make it fun for them by limiting the offers to the first 100 customers. Once words gets around that your Twitter or Facebook account is giving away 'Deals of the week' people will be mad signing up to you and you should notice sales going up. Email is still one of the most effective ways to run your special offers. Spend the time to make your email look stunning and the rewards will come. Reduce pricing of 5 or so random items on your store once a week. It will keep customers checking out your site regularly and is a great way to get people to sign up to your newsletter to see what deals you are currently running on the store.

Offer a loyalty programme - We all like getting something for free. Who doesn't? A great way to encourage customers to come back to your site is to give them a bit of a discount off their next purchase. There are a number of easy ways to do this. You could offer your customer 5% off their next order and send them a promotion code when you send them their order confirmation. It's a great way to say thanks for purchasing from your store and it's a brilliant way to have them come back to your site in the future. You could also send them a discount code after a certain period of time. Maybe 30 days after a sale you could just send a quick email to say thanks for ordering from your store and to show your appreciation you're giving them a discount off their next order. If customers know you're offering deals like this they would be sure to tell their friends about your excellent services!

BONUS TIP: Keep your store front end design up to date -A lot of online store owners forget about this one. Web trends change faster than the Japanese bullet trains and it you don't look after your sites front design you run the risk of it looking dated. As more and more people use online stores they are getting exposed to more and more stores that will have the latest design trends. The trend for people to ignore a store based on its dated appearance is rising fast, especially amongst younger people (18yr - 35). If you already have an online store and you just need a new lick of paint for it then it shouldn't cost you an arm and a leg. In fact it will probably cost you less than you think and could transform the look and feel of your site bringing it bang up to date.

Some of those tips might be no brainers for the more experienced store owners out there but for new store owners it's always good practice to keep these points in mind to help maximise the potential of your new online store. Let me know if you have any other great tips.

Dragnet Systems is proud to launch a huge new project for Ballygarvan stonecraft. This project includes a brand new fully content managed website, a micro site for the 'Barn Store' business, a full online store and estimating tool for garden planning!

The Ballygarvan online store is using our newly updated online store engine and features:

• colour and texture pickers.
• size options.
• brand new store layout for front end.
• Wholesaler section with promotions.

As well as all of the features of our amazing online store software which include:

• No nonsense, simple to use interfaces for your customers and your site admin team.
• Excellent reporting tools showing you what products were sold in any timeframe you choose, view all sales for the last 30 days, view all sales for the last year, etc.
• Reminder emails automatically sent to customers. Useful technique to get your customers to return to your site.
• Promotions tools giving you the flexibility to offer your customers discounts.
• Auto image resizing for product images uploaded. you don't need to worry about resizing your images, our software will manage it all.
• SEO friendly page links. Site fully optimized for Google, MSN, Yahoo, etc.
• Email Marketing. Your customers can easily sign up, and opt out of email marketing on the site. You have total control over the email's sent to your customers. Includes filters to effectively targeting the right people.
• Site optimized for speed. Sites load insanely fast and fully tested with over 100,000 products and orders in the system - it's fully robust!
• And much much more!

I recently ordered some clothing items off a new Irish online store and it really highlighted how poorly people value the web in this country. I purchased some clothes in a retail shop in Cork and wanted to check out the online store advertised on the tag. To be clear the online store was for the clothing item not the retail shop I bought it in. Actually the store I bought the items from doesn't even sell items online but that's another issue ;)

This clothing web store was quite basic, as most Irish stores tend to be but it was easy to use and had what I was looking for so I put an item into the basket and proceeded to checkout the order through PayPal. Everything went through ok but after payment I noticed some short comings with the site. First off I only received a PayPal receipt. The store itself didn't email me my order confirmation or give me an order number! The PayPal receipt mentioned a different company name and email contact than the one I ordered from. From doing some digging around it turned out to be a parent company of the store I bought from but this is definitely not the thing you want your customers to have to spend time finding out. From a customer point of view this didn't fill me with confidence.

The problem now is that I have had no actual confirmation of my order with this store. I gave the company the benefit of the doubt and I did not contact them until a week and a half had passed. After I had received no email about my order being received or items being posted I sent them off an email to them asking if they received the order and forwarded my PayPal receipt showing that they had taken payments on the same day from me. No reply to that email either.

I usually look out for contact email and phone numbers for online stores before making a purchase on any site but overlooked it for this order. I won't be making this mistake again! I noticed that this store didn't have a contact number or email address visible anywhere. They just had an online contact form but that could be going anywhere.

As it stands I have not received my items and I am in the process of cancelling this order using PayPal.

It's funny that after my previous article on how to make a great online store I manage to find one that nearly misses every point and crucially fails to hit the number one point of "Always keep the customer informed". The sad thing is, the majority of people in Ireland running online stores fail to give their store the proper time and attention it needs. When we deliver online stores to our clients we always make sure to teach them how to communicate with their customers effectively. In fact our store software does most of the communication for them. Store owners should just follow these basic rules:

• If you make a payment, send the customer an order number and order summary.
• When fulfilling an order, email the customer to let them know their item is posted out to them or if you are waiting on stock. Don't have the customer contact you about these issues.
• Clearly display your contact details on your site. Don't hide your contact info as it looks like you are hiding something yourself!
  
• Be pro active about your store!

I've decided not to name and shame here as my issue is still ongoing but hopefully this post will inspire some online store owners to get their act together. What about you? Have you had any bad online shopping experiences? What were they and did you manage to get those issues resolved?

We've had some updates in the past for our online store software but not like this! Following on from my recent post about how to make a great online store we have decided to focus this new release on improving the options available to the store admins to help make their lives easier. After all, the easier we make our tools to use the more offers they will give people like you and me!

Along with speed improvements, more options for ordering the appearance of items and updates to our text editor we have added a new tool that allows the site admins to update pricing for all products on the site in just one click! This means that if they want to offer customers a sale on certain items they can update the pricing in less time than it's taken you to read this line of text. We're very excited about this new tool as it makes offering discounts less of a chore for store owners.

We have also made some new tweaks to the styling of the admin tool to make it more IE 8 friendly. The new changes makes our store admin tools 100% compatible and tested with IE 6/7/8, FF2/3/3.5, Chrome 2, Safari 3/4 and Opera 10. It might interest you to know that over 75% of our clients run IE7 for their day to day web browsing. This number is falling all the time and Firefox would appear to be the rising favourite amongst our clients.

Perhaps the biggest news is that not only will all new stores come with these new features and enhancements but we have rolled out these changes to all our existing stores too! Now all of our store users can benefit from these new updates and refinements. We're sure the new updates will go down a treat :D

We've had such a great success lately with our online store software. Our decision to build our own software from the ground up instead of just buying off the shelf has proved to work hugely in our favour. What's interesting is the angle we took when developing our software. We focused not only on the store customer's user experience but also the our client's experience for managing their store.

One of the best things about our software has to be the ease of use of the admin tools. These are the tools that let the store owner manage products, manage orders, manage email marketing, etc. When we were researching the current online stores out there we noticed that the admin tools were one of the main weak spots for many packages out there. Those tools are either very easy to use but don't give enough options to fully manage your store or the opposite, too many options all hidden away in obscure locations and very difficult to work with. This baffled us. Why would a web company spend so much time developing a nice store front end only to have it impossible to use without training by the store owner?

Our interface for our online store software uses common sense. All tools for dealing with products are stored under the heading 'Products' in our system. Product info is not scattered all over the place under 'Reports' or 'Export Details'. It's all located under one heading because this is what the client expects.

Buttons should also say what it is they are going to do! I'm always shocked when I see buttons with the word 'submit' on them. A button should say what the action is it going to perform is - 'Save Product', 'Update Product', 'Delete Product', etc.

Simple things like asking for confirmation before deleting a product can give our clients the confidence that they can't break their new store or give visual feedback after an update so that they know their details were saved. If your client is going to delete a department then be sure to make it clear that any products that depend on that department would also be removed and ask for confirmation if they would like to continue or not. If they choose not to continue then give them a message to let them know their action was cancelled. If they actually did delete the department and all the products within that department then once the action is complete tell the end user that everything was successful.

We actually pride ourselves on having online store software that is so easy to use that no training should be required. When delivering the new store to our client we given them a run through all the site features, explaining in detail how everything works, answer any questions they have and leave them with a nice and simple 'How To' guide so they can get stuck in. We also keep our contact details in plain view for the client when they use our system. If they should ever have a question they can easily send an email or phone us for instant assistance. We don't hide our contact information because we're not afraid of giving support when it's needed.

So how do you make a great online store? You focus on the end user experience! Just don't forget that you have two end users. Your client who will be managing the store in the admin area of the site and the customers to the site who will be using the front end. If you cut corners on the admin tools your client will not be confident in using the site and will be contacting you all the time for assistance. If you cut corners on the front end of the site then you will never help drive sales through the stores! It sounds so simple but it's amazing the number of products out there that get this wrong!

Of course this is only one side in making a great online store. Marketing plays a huge role in getting your store out there and driving sales to your site but this is a topic for another day!

I'd love to hear your stories about your experience with online stores below. If you know of any good stores let me know and if you know really bad ones then it's time to name and shame!!