UI-UX Web Design Trends That Will Influence Businesses in 2017

The web has measured a long distance in the past decade, probably much more than anything else that counts. Internet users have multiplied over the years, surfing the web for shopping, banking, reading, communicating, socializing, and what not? And with the number of increasing users, websites have been mushrooming at a jet speed, making the web more competitive than ever before. ‘Basic’ is no more an acceptable norm when it comes to online stores and other websites. To be on the top and excel, you need to keep up with the latest trends. These trends are based on latest additions to the web market taking it further on the road to progress.

The ultimate motive of these digital design trends is to provide enhanced User Experience (UX) by providing a modernized User Interface (UI). As the web is changing rapidly, these trends are quite dynamic. In this blog, we have jotted down the ongoing UI-UX Web Design Trends based on recent market research and user reviews.

Smart Personalization

Till now, it was pretty much enough to add stock images from the internet to your website but now even older and already popular websites are getting a makeover by adopting creative design solutions to make their websites a better view to visitors. Everything from icons and illustrations to product pictures and website promotions needs smart personalization to enhance user experience. The idea is to create a brand of one’s own by customizing every aspect of the business on the line of thought of the brand.

Personalization not only increases the appearance of the website, but also augments user interface by offering an attractive and smarter site to the user. Website owners must consider designing personalized icons which are compelling enough for the visitors/customers to explore the site further. Product images and videos even though from same brands are now being manually shot in the store’s dedicated studio to present the product from a different perspective than competitive stores are displaying. And the results are visibly rewarding.

Time Controlled Designs

For a considerable time, UX was being estimated on the basis of how much time a customer spends on the site. This perspective is eventually getting outdated. Now, the UX depends on how swift your website is and how quickly it can cater to the requirements of the customer. The customer shouldn’t be forever lost surfing through the products and service they don’t require. Websites are now expected to be designed in smarter way. Filters and smart find options are the new UI-UX trends.

Time controlled designs appreciably help in achieving UX by providing the customer what they want in no time. The world is moving more rapid than ever and an ecommerce store isn’t where a user wants to wander off exploiting their crucial time. Faster services significantly facilitate UI of the website further leading to a great UX as well.

Advanced Animations

The web market is developing at such a rapid pace that trends alter even before the previous one settles in. While we were just witnessing a changing trend of showcasing high definition designer pictures as product images instead of the boring white background workable images, there are already animations and videos emerging up as the latest addition to progressing UI of websites.

Animations are a funky way to present your idea in front of your customers. Moreover, creating animations for your store is comparatively budgetary for your website than shooting new videos every other day. But one important thing that websites need to consider is that the animations shouldn’t be forced. At the end of the day, they aren’t for entertainment but serve a purpose and should be designed accordingly.

Focus on smaller devices

Till now the focus of website designs was on computers and laptop screens. Later on, a workable version for small screens like mobiles and tabs was launched to ease navigation through multiple devices. But now, the trends are altering. Graphics design is now prioritized for mobile devices as the user ship has significantly moved from laptops to smaller screens.

A logical explanation of focusing on mobile devices as primary source of customer interaction is the number of devices people own. Computers and laptops are common these days but not as much as mobile devices. Almost every person who qualifies as a customer owns at least one mobile device with internet connection and spends much more time on their phone than on comparatively cumbersome devices like computers and laptops. Therefore, the latest UI-UX trend demands a responsive website design developed primarily for such devices.

Long Scroll Websites

Though scrolling is more of a basic function of a website than style, but the way websites utilize at a particular point of time can easily be acknowledged as the trends of those times. Presently, we can often spot websites adopting the long-scroll option for displaying content rather than increasing the number of pages. It is aimed to enhance the design of the website and also adds notably to the user experience.

This fashion of long scroll websites has also a direct connection to the trend of mobile websites. Mobile users tend to scroll through the whole page if the content seems relevant rather than clicking and moving to different links for content. This also facilitates a quick look over large volume of content without interruption. The long scroll method forms a linear narrative and imparts seamless content which directly affects the UI and UX of the website.

Flamboyant Color Palettes

The minimalistic website design is still an ongoing trend as was a year ago but the aspects of the design are changing. Keeping the websites too simple was hindering UI and UX to an extent as all websites were unconsciously getting a similar look, providing monotonous UI. The solution to this was derived by adopting attractive color palettes for websites which helped to keep a minimalist design which was far from ordinary.

The use of vibrant colors is intended to gain customer attention and at the same time increase the appeal of the websites, which flat colors fail to provide. You can choose contrasting colors or a themed website with different shades of colors from a particular group. The options are limitless but the test lies in choosing the right option at the right time and for the right thing.

Conclusion

UI-UX trends aren’t only aimed at increasing the aesthetic appeal of the website but greatly affect your visibility on the internet. The competition to survive within the online market is cutthroat and to make a mark is getting trickier by the day. You don’t get to wait and watch if something works for others, to decide it for yourself.

It all happens instantly and the only option you can consider is a bit of market research before adopting something for your website. The rule applies to web designs much more than anything else because it immediately forms the first impression on your visitors. So essentially, either you adopt something straight away and be the trend setter or get the tag of just being a follower. The decision is up to you!

Magento Vs. Shopify: Which is a Better Ecommerce Platform?

Magento and Shopify – you definitely must have heard of these two terms if have researched about ecommerce platforms or have had an experience with mid market online retail. These are two of the most popular and accessible platforms in the market and widely preferred options for several small business owners and entrepreneurs who are willing to have their online store.
Ever wondered what makes Shopify and Magento the most sought after options? What are the pros and cons of both the platforms? If you are confused as to which one to choose out of the two, the following insights will help you decide better.

Shopify is a fast growing ecommerce platform which is mostly used by retailers who want to sell online but don’t have any technical knowhow. It was launched in the year 2006 and provides different packages including a new version. The best part about a Shopify store is that it takes a few minutes to set it up. As soon as you choose one of the packages, sign up for a trial and set up a payment gateway, you can start selling your products online.
Shopify provides a lot of ease for anyone and everyone who is willing to sell things online. It also has ‘buy’ buttons for campaigns, effortless POS integration and Facebook stores.

 

Magento is one the largest ecommerce platforms in the world. Currently, it is used by more than 240,000 retailers. The platform is powerful enough to handle small business as well as huge retail stores like Hermes, Paul Smith, Ford, Nike etc. It was launched in the year 2007, and provides a free (Community Edition) as well as a paid (Enterprise Edition) version for building an online store. Magento has remained unbeaten due to its community which has contributed towards its growth and has published a lot of documentation online. Moreover there are thousands of Magento extensions and modules which help the Magento merchants to save significant development hours.

Shopify Vs Magento: A Comparison

1. Hosting Environment

• Shopify is a hosted platform. So you don’t have to worry about hosting the store, maintaining it and updating the modules from time to time. It is just right for the small business owners who don’t know how to deal with technology and software related issues. There are other platforms like Demandware, Bigcommerce, Volusion etc. However, Shopify remains to be the favourite one. It enables merchants to focus on running their ecommerce store rather than mulling over the technology and software related glitches.
• Magento, on the other hand, is self-hosted. This means that retailers have to manage their own servers and keep themselves updated about the software. You can also seek professional help from your hosting partners or ask Magento development agencies to help. However, all this asks for a lot of effort on the part of retailers. One of the biggest advantages of Magento is that you can have complete control over your store and make changes according to your requirements. For eg, If you want to host a WordPress blog on the same server, you can easily do it with the help of Magento as you are managing the server on your own. This kind of customization is difficult to implement on Shopify.

2. Software Functionalities

If you are starting with your one-man venture, you must know about the way you can traverse around both the ecommerce platforms. So here’s how you can work on both these platforms.

• Shopify has an intuitive and simple interface which can make it easy for the retailers to understand. You just need to add your products, create and manage categories, add different modules etc. Also, even if you have a team of different administrative members handling your store, there are hardly any features which can cause major problems with your estore. It also provides you with control over advanced areas like order confirmation emails, tax settings, delivery options, front end editing etc.
• Magento is a little complex for small business owners as it has been designed to aid larger businesses. The admin interface of Magento requires the store managers to be well-acquainted with the system to be able to use it. And as it is a flexible platform, there are several modules in the admin section which can prove to be helpful and overwhelming at the same time. However, the Admin interface in Magento 2.0 is quite similar to Shopify making it intuitive for someone who is not used to working around Magento.

In short, Magento is perfect for large ecommerce retailers whereas Shopify serves a good purpose for small business.

3. Themes and Templates

• Magento might have some edge over Shopify when it comes to themes and templates. Retailers who have chosen Magento, can make use of several themes and templates available on Magento Connect marketplace and other websites like UberTheme, ThemeForest, etc.
• Shopify provides more than 100 themes and templates at themes.shopify.com, and several other ones like Theme Forest and Template Monster. You will come across several agencies as well as developer & designer teams who often come up with new themes for Magento stores, as there is more demand for custom themes for Magento stores.

Both Shopify and Magento provide premium and free themes. But there are more cost-effective options in Magento. If you opt for Shopify’s premium themes, they start with a much higher range as compared to the ones offered by Magento Connect.
But beware of the fact that there are a many off-shore developers who create vulnerable and poorly coded themes and coax people in other countries to buy them. It is better to stay away from such themes. Conduct proper research as to which theme/templates are useful for your business and whether or not they will fulfill your business requirements.

4. Costs involved

• Shopify has 3 major plans:

Apart from the above they also have a Lite Plan ($9 per month) for those just testing the waters and an unlimited plan for large business with enterprise grade requirements.

• As Magento is an open source platform, you can download and install the CE software for free. But it is important for you to consider the hosting expense which can cost anything from $64 to $129 every month for shared hosting and much higher for cloud hosting, especially if you go for leading cloud hosting providers like Amazon Web Services. There are several Magento hosting companies like UKfast, Nexcess, Peer1, Sonassi etc. However, it is better to seek advice from an expert to decide on a hosting company as it isn’t as easy as you think.

If you are hiring a Magento development company to build your ecommerce store, you also have to count their fees. This can cost you around $1200 if you outsource. If you get it done from within your areas, it can cost more. Especially, if your website is complex and involves a lot of integrations. A basic Magento store must have the following features and modules:

1. Merchandising module
2. Search solution
3. Solution for product reviews
4. One page checkout
5. Payment gateway
6. SEO module

However, as mentioned above, you can have more requirements based on your business and get modules added accordingly. Needless to say, it will require you to shell out some money.

5. Who Helps You Make Better Sales?

Shopify might lag behind in this matter. This is because the basic plan of Shopify doesn’t support sales, discount codes and coupons. With Magento’s basic version, you can do a lot with a purchasing process which includes cross-selling, up-selling and making product comparisons without installing any extensions. There are settings to provide discount from the entire purchase amount when certain products are added to the cart, providing cheap deliveries on the first buy and offering a free gift along with the purchase. This freedom to play with the settings comes as easy as writing your offers on a blackboard at a brick-and-mortar shop.
Although the advanced plans in Shopify provide you with the facility to make promotions and offers and you can take care of it without getting any help from a developer, it is nothing compared to the personalized experience you can provide to your customers on Magento.

6. What About Marketing?

Both Magento and Shopify have the potential to boost the visibility and conversion of your ecommerce store. They are also brilliant with SEO related activities which isn’t the case with other platforms.

• You can extend Magento with extensions that enable you to make the most out of hreflang, have control over dynamic pages, and canonical URLs, get structured data, redirect management, etc.
• Shopify doesn’t help you achieve most of these features. This might prove to be problematic for larger stores.

Magento Connect has different modules for personalisation, social integration, landing page creation, etc. And Shopify is popular for its social capabilities which include shoppable pins, social sign on etc. These features cannot be achieved with Magento. However, you are always free to add extensions.

7. Support and Maintenance

• Shopify provides both dedicated as well as community based support. Retailers can obtain 24/7 support and also look through discussion forums. This kind of support proves to be quite valuable for merchants who take care of the store on their own.
• With Magento, you have to rely on community based support. This means that you will not find any customer service representatives to resolve your issues. So in case there are issues on your Magento store, you have to search on Magento forums and handle problems on your own. And in case you cannot resolve the problem, you can always partner with a Magento agency that can offer you with all the support you need.

To Conclude

Shopify is a good option if you are just starting out in ecommerce and don’t understand much about ecommerce technology. With Shopify you can just focus on merchandising and retailing and leave the technology part to the Shopify folks. This approach works well for many. If you are one of them, Shopify is the way to go.
However, if you are confident about the technology part and are serious about growing your store into a big ecommerce business or want complete control over your store, then Magento is the perfect option for you. It would require a one time investment on server infrastructure and store development. But once that is taken care of, you can spend all your money on marketing your store and growing your business without sharing the proceeds with anyone.
At Biztech we provide both Magento development solutions and Shopify development solutions. If you need to make your store on any of the two platforms, you can always get in touch with us.

Challenges That B2C Ecommerce Businesses Must Overcome in 2017

If you are one of the ecommerce business owners who think that there is no need to provide an exceptional and exclusive shopping experience to your customers; you need to wake up. Customers are the nucleus of ecommerce universe. And right from researching about the brand to ordering it online, they are keen on making the most out of omnichannel experience. It goes without saying that people love to use new gadgets and various shopping options being provided to them by the retailers.

Through this article, we intend to acquaint you with some of the challenges ecommerce store owners must overcome if they want to boost their sales and attain success in today’s highly competitive market. We will also provide you with some ecommerce development solutions and how you can improve the value of your brand.

The Navigators of Online Retail 2017

The year 2017 is all about challenging the old, mundane and stereotype business models. Businesses that have gone beyond conventional models have achieved much more success as compared to others. Number of Millennials is growing in the US and the generation is utilizing mobile and wearable technologies to the fullest. Such technologies have given birth to other customer-friendly channels. Moreover, a new innovation is introduced daily, pushing retail businesses to meet with the expectation of customers who one-of-a-kind need experience while fidgeting around with their devices.

People that indulge into shopping while surfing on their devices are known as connected spenders. A Harvard Business review has revealed that the connected spenders contribute to 19% of global population. And this percentage is likely to grow by 37% by the year 2025. So if you want to be one of the frontrunners in alluring your target audience, you need to render some ultra-modern services and build the reliability for your brand.

Millennials – Spearheading the Consumer Movement

As compared to other connected spenders, Millennials spend much more and are leading the consumer movement. They are quite different compared to the former generation as they expect a customized look and feel to the products, indulge into last minute shopping, want same day delivery and seek instant customer support. And to the core of these buying habits, lies the word “convenience”.

So if you want the high percentage of consumers to buy from you, you need to innovate as much as you can and enhance the buying experience by addressing all the pain points. While choosing e-commerce web solutions for your brand, make sure you speak with the professionals and create a website that offers a good buying experience for your customers.

Rendering mobile oriented experiences

Quite clearly, desktop usage has become a passé and mobiles have taken over. It’s time for retailers to create new opportunities by adapting mobile commerce solutions and win the hearts of their customer base. Vendors can partner with reliable fintechs and provide single-tap payment options to the customers. They can also come up with special discounts and mobile-exclusive offers from time to time so that the number of customers buying through mobile devices phone goes up. For the retailers who are unaware, the mobile payment volume is expected to reach $274 billion by the year 2021.

However, there are certain cyber security concerns when it comes to making mobile payments which need to be dealt with. Ecommerce business owners should integrate only those solutions that are reliable and credible. Some if these mobile wallets are Samsung Pay, Apple Pay and Google Pay. These companies have secured pins and fingerprint verification so that scams can be kept at bay.

Embracing digital currencies

The term ‘Bitcoin’ is a very well known form of digital currency and isn’t new to hear these days. Right now, it might be difficult to decipher how it works but some years down the line, it might become one of the most majorly accepted ways of payment by millennials. Once bitcoin, and the technology it works on (blockchain) is understood, it might get accepted by ecommerce platforms who intend to cater to a particular audience.

Voice Ordering through Virtual Assistants

Imagine not having to even touch or tap a device in order to shop for the required product! When Amazon’s Alexa was introduced in November 2014, it created quite a stir in the market. The voice operated virtual assistants are always ready to serve and can order for what customers want in no time. Looking into this fad, internet retail brands have to be alert and reachable for their customers as and when they want.

Although, marketing professionals know how to attract potential customers, don’t be surprised if retailers partner with Amazon, Google and Apple to create voice oriented and algorithmic marketing campaigns to promote their brand.

How can ecommerce business owners keep up with the trends?

It might get overwhelming and challenging for the ecommerce brands to cope with the ever-changing demands and trends. But the first and the most crucial step that you must take as a retailer is to study the behavior of customers and connected spenders. A detailed study involving buyers’ shopping patterns will provide you with an understanding of what leads them to buy, what results into abandoned ecommerce shopping carts and what factors influence their purchase decisions.

In a nutshell, today’s ecommerce asks you to strike a perfect balance between digital payments, artificial intelligence, mobile application development, cybersecurity and other aspects. If you want to make this a possibility, you should get in touch with a professional and hardworking ecommerce web design & development team. Hiring marketing professionals, who implement technological collaborations, establish valuable customer relationships and drive the change for your brand is also a good idea. What are your thoughts on innovations that influence the field of ecommerce? How open are you to adapt to these changes? Feel free to share with us.

Shopify Vs WooCommerce: Choosing the Best Ecommerce Platform for 2017 and Beyond

The universe of eCommerce has been expanding rapidly for the past few years. Every business, be it a start up or a popular one, has its presence on the internet. You might be planning to make your presence felt on the internet amongst other brands too. But before you launch an ecommerce platform for your business, several questions might pop up in your mind as to – “Who is a good hosting provider?”, “Which theme to go for?”, “Which domain to purchase?” etc.
Shopify Vs WooCommerce – choosing one of the two is one of the biggest dilemma that business owners face. Some might suggest choose Shopify and some might ask you to go for Woocommerce. This is because both of these are top-notch ecommerce platforms and both are well-accepted amongst business owners for having a simple and efficient user interface. Through this blog, we will provide you with some clarity about each of these platforms, and acquaint you with their strengths as well as drawbacks. It might help you to come up to a decision.

Understanding Shopify and WooCommerce

Shopify

You might have heard a lot about Shopify. It was launched in the year 2008 in Canada and is currently providing Shopify ecommerce store development solutions to more than 150K businesses. For all those who are unaware, it is a web based ecommerce platform that provides the businesses with a hosting platform and manages all the hosting requirements for them.
You can feel free to choose the domain name of your choice. As Shopify provides with a readymade platform, it becomes easy for the ecommerce store owners to have an online store without having technical knowhow. It has its own app store from where you can purchase different themes based on your requirement and budget.

WooCommerce

WooCommerce is an open source plugin for WordPress users. In order to use WooCommerce, you will need a self hosted website and WordPress installed within. If you like WordPress and are aware of its plugins, WooCommerce is a good option. But if you have still not decided which option to choose, you should know about the features of both the platforms.

Shopify Vs. WooCommerce: A Comparison

1. User friendliness

When it comes to user friendliness, Shopify is always the first choice. As soon as you create an account with Shopify, they navigate you to complete the setup, manage your hosting and help you with Shopify customization based on your choices and requirements. You can completely rely on Shopify to do an errorless job of setting up an estore for you. Needless to say, you don’t even need to have any technical knowledge to set up your ecommerce store. However if you want a custom look for your store or want any custom features you would have to opt for competent Shopify development services.
Setting up WooCommerce is not difficult either. It is just that the process can be a little prolonged as you need to install and update WordPress and install the WooCommerce plugin. If you haven’t embarked upon a task like this before, you might find it difficult.

2. Flexibility and themes

Every business owner likes to have an attractive looking ecommerce store and themes are a prerequisite for that. Shopify has its own theme store from where one can choose from more than 180 different themes. Several themes are available for free. However, if you want to go for the exclusive ones, you might have to pay for them. You can also customize the look and feel of these themes without any coding.
WooCommerce doesn’t provide with a theme store but you can consider a third party option like Themeforest which provides with more than 600 Woocommerce themes ranging from $29 to $64. You also might find free themes, but then you might have to work on customizing them on your own as you cannot get any support.

3. Product features and presentation

Shopify and WooCommerce rank the same when it comes to providing options for uploading pictures, writing product descriptions, adding product details like size, colour etc. But as WooCommerce works inside your WordPress theme, some of the images might not look great. So you need to keep yourself aware about the same. This doesn’t happen with Shopify.

4. Making Payments

Shopify charges extra fees if you use an external payment processor to process credit cards. But you can use external payment processors only in countries like US, Canada, UK and Australia. So if your business is located somewhere else, you might have to go through a payment gateway or a third party service. The charges of Payment Gateway vary according to different countries. So do your research before you decide one for yourself.
WooCommerce provides with different payment gateway extensions. Try adding Paypal through Stripe. You can also opt for Authorize.Net, Braintree, Amazon Payments and other payment gateways by paying a price of $79 annually. Hence, you can find an array of payment options in both the platforms. But it also depends on your location, your budget and extra fees that you need to spend.

5. Language flexibility

For a long time, Shopify users have found it difficult to offer multi language support on their ecommerce store. The only option was to duplicate the store and add sub domains which proved to be expensive. Now, it provides with a Langify app, which costs $17.50 per month.
WooCommerce wins here due to its popular and reliable WPML plugin. It offers a multilingual solution at $79 during the first year and $39 thereafter. This option is quite cheap as compared to Shopify.

6. Tax Settings

Shopify and WooCommerce both provide you with an option to display prices with or without taxes. Both the platforms do the math and calculate the tax rate based on your location which makes it easy for you to decide the final figure.

7. Page Speed and Uptime

You must be aware that websites whose uptimes are low have to pay a fine to Google. Shopify undoubtedly provides with the best speed. But the speed of a WooCommerce website will depend on your web hosting service. In case you are hosting the WordPress site for yourself, you need to make sure that you reach an uptime of 99.95% or more. If you are hosting from outside, the hosting companies will give you an agreement mentioning the guaranteed uptime.

Concluding…

So the question is, what should you choose? WooCommerce or Shopify? Go for WooCommerce if you are using WordPress, like its plugins, need multilingual support and want to make the best out of SEO.
In case if any of the above points are not a part of your strategy, go for Shopify. Extremely easy to set up, cost-effective, entails a lot of features and provides support. Once you have clarity about the kind of ecommerce platform you want to have, it will be easy for you to take the right decision.

Key Advantages of Mcommerce You Must Know About

Mobile ecommerce, also known as Mcommerce has completely transformed the ways in which eCommerce businesses approach their customers. You all must be aware that as a part of Mcommerce, most of the business transactions take place through mobile devices. However, Mobile commerce is not confined to eCommerce industry.

There are several ways in which it is influencing the lives of retailers and their customers. So what are the ways in which Mcommerce benefitting the businesses of today? What advantages are provided by Mcommerce to the retailers? Let us find out.

1. Bridging gaps through push notifications

Push notifications have become the most preferred way for businesses to get in touch with customers as well as potential clientele. Notifications help in sending an instant message and notifying customers about upcoming offers as mobiles are carried by people wherever they go.

A Survey by Responsys proved that 76% customers between the age group of 18 to 34 who shop through mobiles have enabled push notifications from their favourite brands. Hence, if you have an mCommerce app that sends push notifications, it can help to boost your conversion rate by targeting the audience you want to. There are several companies providing Android App development which enables you to send push notifications easily.

2. Single click calling

Gone are the days when customers used to shoot emails and wait to hear from the company in 24 hours or a week. Delays in getting back to the customers make them change their preferences and impression of the company. Thus, it is better to provide with a contact option that helps customers to reach service executives without a lot of effort. With the one click calling, real time chat assistance and toll-free numbers, companies have become more accessible and approachable.

3. Location Tracking & Personalized Notifications

Suppose your customer is passing by your coffee shop…and your company sends an instant push notification about the latest flavours of coffee or other offers at your shop; the customer is sure to check in and find out about it. So once a customer subscribes to your brand, you can send location based push notifications with personalized discounts and boost your sales. Yet another study by Responsys proved that personalized push notifications are liked by people and provide with 2 times higher conversion rates as compared to the ones made through marketing emails.

4. In App Payments

Payment convenience and security are the two most important aspects expected by customers when they making transactions with a brand. And this is why in app payment facility is one of the biggest advantages of Mcommerce. So how does in-app payment work? Once the customers download the app of your company, they can pay from within the application and get personalized offerings through you. Also there is no need of third-party payment gateways as they are hosted by the platform itself. This means that Android users can pay through Google Wallet and iOS users can pay through Apple Pay.

Through mobile wallets, customers can maintain a prepaid account through which amount is debited after making a purchase. These changes in the online payment systems enabled businesses to fetch more customers and offer products and services based on the subscription. Approach companies that provide MCommerce App Development so that you can come up with an intuitive and smart app for your customers.

5. Omnichannel promotions

If you are making the most out of mcommerce, you can promote your ecommerce business in a lot of ways. Besides push notifications, you can send daily/weekly deals, coupons, offer special prices for registered customers and free shipping so that the numbers of registered users go up. By doing so, you will be able to market your business well and increase the number of customers. People who get in touch with your brand through social media apps can be given a good user experience by optimizing content and user-friendly interface.

In the year 2015, a research by eMarketer proved that the mobile ad expenses comprise of 49% of total digital ad expense spent by brands and companies. The research revealed that mobile ad spending will go up to 57 billion US dollars in the year 2018; which makes it 29 billion dollars more than what it was in June 2015.

Investing for providing enriched Mobile commerce experience

Most of the companies today are working towards enhancing the customer experience by making innovative products, service and data so that the customers can make the most out of it and they can have a competitive advantage over others.

In today’s times when people interact with their devices more than anyone else, there can’t be a better opportunity to promote your business. So if you want to succeed with your mobile commerce ventures, you must find a unique mobile Ecommerce solution. You can conduct research, get in touch with companies that offer these services, and invest on different technologies to enhance the experience of your customers.

B2B Ecommerce Marketing: 6 Strategies for Success

When it comes to promoting a B2B business, the entrepreneurs are not as enthusiastic B2C business owners. They don’t make the most out of marketing and other tactics to enhance their market reach and often tend to underplay.

Also, owning an ecommerce store is not easy. You need to target the audience, indulge into product marketing, conduct SEO and do a lot more. During such times, it might get perplexing as to which tactics to choose for promoting your B2B ecommerce business. To help you get over your problems, we are here with some highly effective tactics that will help you to lessen the bounce rates and boost your sales. Take a look at them.

Provide an easy access to your product catalog

“If you’ve got it, flaunt it.” All the B2B business owners must remember this adage. You might want to restrict the shopping cart access for security purposes and keep it limited the registered customers so that they go through your sales team. But it is advisable to keep an open access to it so that the information can be looked into and shared by your potential customers to others. When your catalog is open to both general visitors and registered users, it will also enhance the ranking of your website on Google Search Engine.

In case your business is not meant for all the visitors, you can hide the Add to Cart button so that single purchases can’t be made on your wholesale website. Also, open catalog will make the work easy for your sales and marketing team as they will not have to spend a lot of time giving prolonged product explanations to customers.

Make bulk ordering simple

It is very important to optimize the ordering process on your B2B ecommerce store. The lesser the difficulty in checking out, the lesser are the number of cart abandonments. When it comes to bulk ordering, nobody likes to add product to the cart as many times as the number of products. In order to help your customers get over these ordering concerns, integrate a quotation manager extension to your ecommerce store.

With the help of this extension, users can search for the product, enter the quantity of products needed and add it to the cart. This way, your customers will not have to spend a lot of time in placing their order and you will also be able to boost your sales.

Provide better search options

Gone are the days when the access to products was dependent on a simple search bar. Over the years, search functionalities have become smarter and intelligent autofills, spelling corrections and suggestions have become some of the most common features.

Invest into an advanced search tool that helps customers to surf for products based on name, features, colour, SKU etc and also suggests products based on their purchase history. Analysis of searched information will also help you to conduct an effective SEO process.

Offer layered navigation

When customers are visiting your website for the first time, they might not be aware about your offerings. This makes it difficult for them to find what they are looking for. By offering layered navigation, wholesalers will be able to filter through your products easily. You will also be able to help them locate the products without the need for them to create a new search.

Inculcating multi select features, flashing latest offers and smart filter options will save the time of your customers spent behind reloading the pages and stopping the number of crashes.

Share useful content

Content still continues to reign as a king. You need to offer content that answers questions of your customers and takes care of their requirements. Take your ecommerce store beyond being just a catalog store and make yourself a valued partner of your customers. Several B2B website owners post product videos, images as well as customer reviews on their websites and it leads them to make better conversions.

Use rich content like CAD files, spec sheets, support documents, product catalogs, part explosion diagrams etc as it adds values for the shoppers. Remember, the more detailed the information, the more assurance it offers to your customers that they are investing into a right product.

Make the checkout process easy

If your checkout process is simple, your conversion rates are sure to get better. Try to a one page checkout process so that your customers do not have to traverse through several pages and provide with different information on each page. This checkout page should include customer, shipping and credit card information all in one place. Also, if you have a single checkout page, the likelihood of your website to crash will decrease.

You can also use extensions to provide discount codes, offers and newsletter subscriptions before they check out. It’s a great way to boost your sales.

Have a responsive ecommerce store

Mobiles have taken over the basic way in which people experience the World Wide Web. Most of the transactions happen on mobile, tablets and other devices these days. And that is why ecommerce experts advice the ecommerce store owners are to build a responsive ecommerce website time and again. Try developing an ecommerce website which doesn’t just look good on desktops and laptops.

You can get in touch with professional ecommerce website developers who use different responsive themes and templates for Magento so that they can provide you with an attractive and user-friendly interface.

On a concluding note

Above mentioned are the most crucial B2B ecommerce tactics that we could think of. But if you want to know more, you can read the case study “The Five Foundational Pillars of B2B Ecommerce” published by Magento.

It is the right time for ecommerce store owners to add layered navigation in their search tools, use responsive website design or adding bulk ordering. Do you have any insights on B2B ecommerce tactics that you would like to share? Feel free to write to us!

Top 8 PHP Frameworks for Developing Web Apps

 Business owners and developers are always on a lookout for a modern, scalable and organized framework when it comes to building a website that has a high complexity level. PHP frameworks are a perfect option during such times as 82.7% of websites thrive on PHP coding according to a Web Technology Survey.

If you too, are considering web development for your website, you first need to know why you should opt for PHP. Once you know what makes PHP the best, you can start looking for the right type of PHP framework for your website.

Why Should You Opt for PHP framework?

PHP frameworks are known to save a lot of time and effort spent behind website development. Here’s why you should choose PHP over other frameworks:

• Enables swift web development
• Offers developers with a systematized, maintainable and reusable coding
• Enhances the security of a website
• Helps build scalable web applications to boost your sales
• Follows the MVC (model-view-controller) which helps to separate logic and presentation
• Comes with object oriented programming tools

Now that you’ve known the features that make PHP the best, you might be wondering which PHP framework to go for. To help you get over the confusions, we have listed the 8 most popularly used PHP frameworks along with their features and advantages.

1. Laravel 

When it comes to finding a PHP framework that supports large scale web application development, Laravel stands in the forefront. It boasts support from a huge community and a lot of tutorials that provide you with all the information about building a website. The companies that offer Laravel development solutions make use of rich features in order to develop your website and bring it to life. It has its own template engine known as blade which enables the developers to write PHP in the templates bringing no performance overheads to the application.

2. Symfony

Symfony is the best choice if you need to craft a website for a large scale enterprise. It was released in the year 2005 by an interactive agency named Sensiolabs. The ecosystem of this PHP framework is packed with several reusable components and a very active community. You can get an idea about its feature rich components from the fact that even Laravel uses most of its components. Its template engine is known as “Twig” which is highly popular amongst the developers. There companies offering Symfony development services also make the most out of this template engine.

Symfony has driven some of the biggest open source projects like PHPBB, PIWIK, Dhrupal and OROCRM. It can be obtained under MIT license and also downloaded from the github repository. Symfony framework is available under MIT license and can be downloaded from its Github repository.

3. Phalcon

Phalcon, again, is one of the most modern frameworks which was crafted keeping the speed factor in mind. It is written in C language and is the fastest PHP framework available today. Despite of the fact that it is written in C, it is a full stack MVC framework that comes along with rich features like templates, controllers, routing, ORM, query language, caching etc.

It has stood strong in its competition with other frameworks and has defeated them with its swift performance. Released on 2012, Phalcon is extremely easy to learn and is loved by several PHP developers. However, there is some level of skepticism amongst few developers when it comes to developing Phalcon based solutions as it is written in C.

4. CakePHP

Despite of being the oldest PHP framework, CakePHP is still in high demand amongst the developers after the release of its latest version CakePHP 3.0. Laravel and Symfony being the latest frameworks haven’t been able to suppress its popularity. It was released in the year 2005 and can be obtained under MIT license and can be used in commercial as well as personal projects. Some of the well-known users of CakePHP frameworks are Hyundai, Zumba, BMW and Express.

The latest version used for CakePHP development offers decoupled components for better modularity, standalone libraries, session management and much more.

5. CodeIgniter

CodeIgniter was released in the year 2006 and is a decade old. It is very easy to install and has a simple configuration process making it easy for the developers to use. Whenever you need to get over the PHP version conflict, Codeigniter works the best as it is compatible with most of the hosting platforms.

Being a lean framework, it is only 2MB in size and can be downloaded easily. This means that third party plugins can be added if one needs to execute complicated functions. As most of the PHP developers go for Laravel and Phalcon, the demand of CodeIgniter development is declining.

 

6. Yii Framework

Yii Framework was released in the year 2008 and is one of the oldest PHP frameworks. After the advent of Symfony and Laravel, it had almost lost the race. But after the release of Yii 2.0, it is becoming a preferred choice for enterprise based Yii web application development.

Yii has a code generator tool named Gii and includes a lot of features that fulfill the requirements of modern web application development. This PHP framework boasts of a helpful and active community which is constantly making efforts to take it to the next level. If you use Yii, you will also realize that its documentation is better than any other PHP frameworks.

 

7. Zend Framework

Zend Framework has been around for over a decade and is used by several corporate giants like Cisco WebEx, BBC and BNP Paribas for their website projects. As Zend has a steep learning curve and is difficult to learn, it takes for senior and experienced developers to build a website using the framework.

The community development team of this framework consists of core PHP developers and they make sure that it remains complete, stable and robust. It is better to hire professionals for Zend development as its configuration is complicated. If you want to undertake small and medium scale projects, using Zend is not advisable. Some developers are also moving from Zend to Phalcon and Laravel as it is a complex framework. Google, IBM, Microsoft and Adobe are the partners of Zend framework.

 

8. Slim

Slim PHP framework offers the developers with everything they need and eliminates the extra and unnecessary features. The maker of this framework was inspired by a Ruby micro framework named Sinatra. It comes with a minimalistic design and works great for small apps which do not require a full-stack framework.

Slim is used by PHP developers when it comes to developing RESTful APIs and services. It provides with features like session and cookie encryption, client-side HTTP caching, URL routing etc. If you are into Slim development, you can read through its user guide.

 

Drawing Conclusions

Although PHP frameworks are built using different methods and concepts, there is a single underlying requirement which is – to have a smoothly running web application with a maintainable code. Although PHP is an old framework, its web development landscape has always remained dynamic. The above mentioned frameworks have been the most popular ones in the world of modern web applications.

If you have a website that has a complex infrastructure as well as huge CRM and CMS systems, PHP is the right choice. What is your experience with PHP frameworks? Which one of the above mentioned frameworks would you prefer to use? Please feel free to share with us.