Selling online to the global market

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Many of our New Zealand based ecommerce customers sell their products to markets outside of our country. For most, the global markets offer far greater opportunities for growth than just our small country at the bottom of the globe.

While overseas marketings can seem enticing, you need to ensure you have all the right information about your market, your customer and the best way to promote your business in the digital space.

NZTE have an excellent resource to help you navigate some of these areas, and even have additional information on the largest online market places for each continent.

International e-commerce opens up a world of customers, and gives you the opportunity to connect directly to your target markets. But which online marketplace is the right one to reach your target customers? What do you need to consider before taking the plunge?

Take a look at details about online platforms, read our tips, resources and guides to find out more about where you can sell, how much you may need to invest and what you need to know about each platform before you dive in.

To check out these resources you can visit here. Or contact us at Digital Operative to help you with your global digital platforms and marketing initiatives.

WooCommerce new Facebook ad extension released

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WooCommerce have just released their latest free extension – Facebook for WooCommerce.

This extension can help you grow your ecommerce business and sell to people while they are on Facebook.

1. Facebook Ads Extension

This helps you in the following ways:

  1. Set up the Facebook pixel to build your audience, optimize your ads for people likely to buy and reach people with relevant ads on Facebook after they’ve visited your website.
  2. Connect your product catalog to automatically create carousel ads that showcase the products you sell
  3. When you have the Facebook pixel set up, you can use Facebook ads reporting to understand the sales and revenue that resulted from your ads.

What’s included?

Installing the Facebook pixel allows you to access the features below:

  • Conversion tracking: See how successful your ad is by seeing what happened as a direct result of your ad (including conversions and sales)
  • Optimization: Show your ads to people most likely to take a specific action after clicking on them, like adding an item to their cart or making a purchase
  • Remarketing: When people visit your website, reach them again and remind them of your business with a Facebook ad

2. Facebook Shops on Pages:

With the Facebook shop section, you can showcase your products and drive sales.

  1. It takes just a click to send your entire catalog to Facebook. Any changes made on your WooCommerce website are automatically synced with your Facebook shop.
  2. You can organize your products into collections and even tag them in photos to improve visibility and highlight your best sellers on both Instagram and Facebook.
  3. The Facebook shop section offers a beautiful shopping experience on all mobile devices, letting you showcase your products on any screen.

To find out more and download the extension you can visit the WooCommerce site here. Or if you have a WordPress site using WooCommerce and need assistance with the installation and set-up of this then please contact us.

So what is responsive design?

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If you’re looking to update your current website you will be guaranteed to come across the term ‘responsive design’. Website developers throw around these words, and everyone’s talking about it, but what does it mean? Not everyone understands the term, so we covered off the basics to give you a better understanding. So what is responsive design?

A bit of History

In the past most websites were designed and developed based on a fixed layout. This size was most commonly a screen width of 1024px, and considered a relatively safe size for website development. Of course this didn’t work well on the smaller mobile screens, and left websites looking small and lost on larger desktop screens. Enter the iPad and other tablets and this meant even more issues with how sites were displayed.

For many websites, creating a version for each resolution and new device would be impossible, impractical or expensive. Today websites can be viewed on phones, “phablets”, tablets, desktops, game consoles, and even televisions.

Keeping up with the changes

To keep up with the changing face of surfing the internet, responsive design was introduced to handle multiple devices. Simply put, responsive design means a website that has been developed so that all of the content, images and structure of the site remain the same no matter which device you are using to view it.

For example, when a user accesses a website on their desktop computer, they get the full view of the site. But when the same user goes to visit the site from their tablet or phone, the site will automatically resize to fit on the smaller screen. You only need to develop one codebase for all of your users, no matter what device they use.

Do you need to switch to responsive design?

In todays digital world more and more people are using mobile devices, so it’s important that your site can adapt to any screen size. If you website is not responsive you could be losing business. If you want to check your traffic statistics, use your google analytics account and you might be surprised at how many visitors are getting to your website using mobile devices.

The key reasons for going responsive are:

  • Responsive design is key for good search engine optimisation
  • There are more users accessing sites from mobile devices
  • Shopping on mobiel devices is steadily growing
  • One site is easier to manage than multiple sites
  • It provides a better user experience for your customers

Is it expensive?

Designing and developing a responsive website is no more expensive than a conventional website. If you are not sure if your site is responsive or would like to find out more please contact us.

Should I upgrade Magento?

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The answer is almost always yes. If you’re currently running Magento Version 1.4, 1.5, 1.6, or 1.7, you should definitely upgrade as soon as possible, as there are security issues, and a wealth of usability options that you’re missing out on.

Some of these upgrades will simply make your life a lot easier, but others are absolutely mission-critical.

If you’re running Magento 1.8 and above, upgrading is less essential, but is certainly a good idea. And that takes us to the more complicated question.

Why do I need to upgrade?

The answer to this question is a bit more involved. A new version of Magento has been released each year for the past few years, generally in conjunction with the yearly Magento Imagine event held in April.

Each new version includes three main categories of upgrades: Platform Fixes to solve functionality problems found in the previous version, Security Patches to address security vulnerabilities that have become evident since last release, and Platform Upgrades that add new features and capabilities to Magento that were not previously available.

Here is a list of some of the fixes, patches and upgrades that were included in the Magento 1.9 upgrade alone:

Upgrades:
The default Magento theme is now mobile-responsive, allowing you to make your site smart phone and tablet-friendly right out of the box. This also has big implications for SEO.
Cross-border trade (also called pricing consistency), European merchants operating across regions and geographies the ability to show their customers a single price. Pricing is clean and uncluttered regardless of tax structures and rates that vary from country to country.
Supports PHP 5.4.
The Zend Framework has been upgraded to version 1.12.3
Checkout improvements, including Bill me later option, Additional Pay Pal express checkout options to increase conversion, and more.

Security Patches:
Addressed a potential cross-site scripting (XSS) vulnerability while creating configurable product variants.
Addressed a potential security issue that could result in displaying information about a different order to a customer.
Users can no longer change the currency if the payment method PayPal Website Payments Standard is used.
Removed an .swf file from the Magento distribution because of security issues.
Improved file system security.
Enhanced the security of action URLs, such as billing agreements.
Addressed a potential session fixation vulnerability during checkout.
Improved the security of the Magento randomness function.

Platform Fixes:
Web Store and Shopping Cart Fixes
Promotional Price Rule Fixes
Administrative Ordering, Invoicing, Credit Memo Fixes
Import Fixes
Payment Method Fixes
Other Fixes

Keep in mind that these changes, fixes and patches were added with the Magento CE 1.9 release only, so these are the updates you would receive if only upgrading from Magento version 1.8 to version 1.9. If you are upgrading from Version 1.4, 1.5, 1.6 or 1.7, there will be additional (and equally comprehensive) lists of updates for each version you are behind.

For the security patches alone, upgrading is a necessity. But the fixes and upgrades that each version adds will take your Magento experience to the next level, and streamline many processes that may currently take you a lot of extra work and time to complete.

The latest release

1. Technology updates and quality improvements: This new release includes the latest versions of the Zend 1 Framework and Redis integration, as well as over 105 quality improvements throughout the product.

2. Automated functional testing framework: Community Edition merchants can now access nearly 170 automated functional tests. This can help improve implementation quality and time to market by making it easier to do basic acceptance testing when adding extensions, making customizations, or upgrading.

3. Continuous security enhancements: Community Edition 1.9.2 incorporates recent security patches (SUPEE-5344, SUPEE-5994, and SUPEE-6285) into the core code to help merchants better protect their sites.

Upgrading to the latest version of Magento is a necessity, and it’s even more important to do so if you’re more than one version behind. Magento is contantly adding new functionality and fixes which will make your store run more quickly, efficiently and securely, and these yearly updates are free and relatively easy to take advantage of.

The process can be done by an amateur Magento programmer, but it’s highly recommended that you get a Magento Certified Developer to do the upgrade – especially if you’re upgrading from a significantly older version of Magento (1.7 or earlier).

If you need any help with this then please feel free to contact us

Joomla’s remote code execution patch

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Earlier this week a high level security vulnerability was identified with the Joomla Content Management System.

For more information please click here.

Joomla has now issued a patch for this zero-day vulnerability affecting all versions from 1.5 to 3.4.5 and is urging site administrators to update to version 3.4.6.

Joomla has marked the severity of the vulnerability as high, and in is description said the Remote Code Execution vulnerability is caused as “browser information is not filtered properly while saving the session values into the database.”

The process in the market for this is to patch the 3.4 version.

If you are running an older version of Joomla then this is an opportune time to relook your current site and upgrade to a new responsive website, or alternatively you can assess the benefits of moving to an alternative CMS.

If you fall in to this camp then we would recommend you get pricing for both options before deciding which best suits your business requirements and budget.

If you have any questions relating to this vulnerability or patch then please feel free to contact our team at [email protected].