by Agbi B. | Dec 20, 2013 | Press
It’s been a great year here at Redstage. We’ve done a lot of exciting things, built an even better team and launched some amazing projects! But it isn’t just all work and no play here. We recently had our annual holiday party at an event space in New York City and thought we would share some highlights from the day.
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by Agbi B. | Dec 11, 2013 | System Integrations
Every month, we feature a partner company who has produced great results for our clients. This month, we are featuring one of our hosting partners, Zerolag.
Peace of mind as a service
ZeroLag provides fully managed enterprise-class hosting solutions built on a foundation of support, reliability, performance and security – and delivered at competitive prices.
The company has been in business for more than a decade, and counts the NFL, Microsoft, CBS, General Motors, Fox, National Geographic and other name brands among its many satisfied clients. All of the company’s services are customized to clients’ unique needs, allowing ZeroLag to efficiently serve businesses of all sizes.
While ZeroLag uses only best-in-class hardware and software – such as Dell PowerEdge servers, Cisco routers, and F5 load balancers, plus Microsoft, VMWare, and Magento software – the company believes that being a great hosting provider goes beyond deploying state-of-the-art technology. ZeroLag backs up it up with superior service; including problem-solving hosting experts and a 24/7/365 support staff located in the company’s Tier 4 data center.
GTR Store (gtrstore.com)
- ZeroLag worked closely with Redstage to plan and execute a smooth, trouble-free migration for this musical instrument e-tailer, from their former web hosting provider to ZeroLag’s Magento-optimized hosting environment, while simultaneously upgrading from Magento Community Edition to Enterprise Edition.
Bambi Baby (bambibaby.com)
- A leading brick and mortar and eCommerce retailer of baby products, Bambi Baby experienced web site performance and reliability issues while hosted with their previous provider.
- ZeroLag and Redstage worked together to move the company’s web site to a dedicated server, and later to a Magento-optimized hosting cluster to provide the necessary resources to support the company’s online sales growth.
- ZeroLag also played a lead role in analyzing and implementing web site optimizations which resulted in improved performance.
For more information on Zerolag, visit their site www.zerolag.com
by Agbi B. | Dec 5, 2013 | Uncategorized
With the holidays upon us, here are some helpful tips to help make the most out of this holiday season. Work on implementing some of these tips for an easy way to boost sales and profits.
1. Prepare in advance – you could receive 40-60% more traffic
Speak with your hosting company to see if your server will handle a massive increase in traffic and discuss options for adding resources to handle extra traffic. 57% of customers will leave your site if your page takes longer than 4.3 seconds to load. Limited number of warehouse staff for processing orders or customer service reps for dealing with customer communications? Staff up temporarily for the holidays to keep customer service levels high and to keep up with extra orders.
2. Go Mobile
Every year, mobile eCommerce increases by 100-150%, you need to make sure you are not missing out on this market. This could be a custom implementation by your developer or quickly installing a mobile theme that you’ve purchased from the web. There are a number of mobile solutions out there, but our favorite is MobileNow for Magento – it’s quick and inexpensive, and you get to customize the theme – (www.mobilenowapp.com)
3. Check inventory levels
You will be selling 30-40% more this holiday season, some eCommerce sites sell as much as 80% of their yearly volume in the weeks between Black Friday and Christmas. You need to make sure to have a good handle on stock levels and purchasing plans at this time of year. Have your most popular items in stock and factor in time for potential supplier delays which may affect your ability to fulfill orders promptly for your customers. Running out of items will cost you sales now and will likely affect your future sales as well.
4. Check for bottlenecks
Slow page loads will most definitely turn off your visitors and cause them to leave losing you sales! Grease the wheels a bit by performing some site optimizations or upgrading your hosting for the season. There are a number of free services out there, such as webpagetest.org and pingdom.com – which will give you a free analysis on how your site is performing.
5. Get Social
Advertising can be time-consuming and expensive. Let your customers help take some of the weight off your shoulders! Make sure you have implemented some social sharing features (facebook, twitter, pinterest, etc.) so your customers can share their favorite products with their friends.
6. Add more product media
Sometimes, just seeing a photo or two of a product isn’t enough to give the customer a full picture of what you’re selling. This is a suggestion that applies regardless of the season, but implementing videos and 360 views of your products will increase customer confidence and increase conversion. Show off your products by providing demo videos and tell your customers the whole story.
7. Ramp up email marketing
As the holidays come around, all of those newsletters that you’ve signed up for start sending out tons of emails prompting you to go their site and check out their deals, use this special coupon code or check out their new products available now. These companies do this for a reason – IT WORKS! Spend some extra time on putting together exciting marketing emails with a good call to action to push your customers to visit again.
8. Implement a PPC strategy
If you don’t already use PPC, start right away. People are searching for what you sell, they just need to be able to find you. If you can spend some money to increase your traffic and get targeted visitors, this is a no-brainer way to generate additional sales on your site.
9. Offer Free shipping & Expedited shipping discounts
Studies have shown that customers expect free shipping and are more willing to purchase from sites that offer free shipping. You don’t need to offer free shipping on all orders, but offer a free shipping at a minimum order threshold such as $50 or $100. This will encourage customers to add more products to their order to reach that minimum threshold increasing your average dollars per order. Also, there are plenty of procrastinating shoppers out there – so be sure to set up shipping options that get presents to people before Christmas!
10. Add trust logos and security
It’s very cheap to purchase an SSL certificate for your site – we like www.comodo.com. Also, add trust logos to your site once you are SSL secured, have paypal or merchant services partnerships, and add the credit card logos.
11. Incentivize your Customers
Incentivize customers to buy early – Offer special promotions to customers who purchase early. Encourage your customers to buy now rather than wait it out for a better deal by giving them a special perk for doing so: Free upgrade to Expedited shipping, 10% of gift cards purchased before December 15th, or guaranteed holiday delivery for orders placed by a certain date.
For more ways to improve your site for the holidays, feel free to contact us at info@redstage.com to see how we can help you boost your holiday sales! Good luck, and Happy holidays!
by Adam M. | Jun 13, 2013 | UX/UI Design
“The art of war teaches us to rely not on the likelihood of the enemy’s not coming, but on our own readiness to receive him; not on the chance of his not attacking, but rather on the fact that we have made our position unassailable.” –Sun Tzu
The battlefield of the Consumer Market has changed. Consumers are no longer accessing your website from a single type of device. Reports show that mobile based traffic will be growing to 30% of overall traffic in the very near future.
The reality is that this chart is unfairly skewed toward the PC since streaming traffic is currently less prevalent on mobile devices.
To compound the issues that online retailers are facing, new sizes and resolutions of mobile devices are released monthly. Simply optimizing for the iPhone Retina or iPad is no longer an option.
In this fast growing, diversified mobile world, how can you rise above your enemy? How do you make your position—as Sun Tzu put it—“unassailable?”
RESPONSIVE DESIGN or Responsive Web Design is the art of creating a site that adapts to different sizes, devices, and input types—automatically. It is a non-app based; non-separate mobile site web design strategy. To get slightly more technical, it is web design that uses fluid grids (modifying code that defines grid dimensions in relative terms to maintain the proportions of your web design across differently sized browsers), flexible images (browser code that that flexibly scales images), and media queries (which basically “instructs” browsers to re-render layout instantly as the viewport/device screen changes size; without the issues of device compatibility).
But why choose Responsive Design over creating apps and mobile versions of your website? We’ve got some very compelling reasons for you…
Responsive Design Consolidates Marketing Strategies.
If you opt to create a mobile version of your site (an “m.site” where your main site redirects to when accessed on a mobile device) you lose or sacrifice the quality of this analytics data that gives you insight into your customer base and target market. You also run the risk of getting flagged for duplicate content, which although avoidable takes more effort and resources to keep in check. Responsive design keeps your analytics data intact by utilizing the same site regardless of the device. The source pool of this analytics data is even broadened, thus providing you more intimate insight into your customer’s needs and preferences.
Furthermore, you get SEO benefits as all backlinks link to one website. m.sites often end up stealing valuable SEO juice and can even outrank your main site on a desktop search for certain key terms.
Responsive design also dramatically decreases bounce rate (consumers losing interest in your site due to aesthetic and/or functionality/usability issues) because the content presentation, accessibility, and whatever marketing strategy you have applied remains intact and optimized for the consumer’s experience.
Responsive Design Creates Conducive eCommerce Environment.
PCs are meant to be used with a mouse and keyboard interface. Tablets often have users interacting with multiple fingers and enjoy swiping to navigate. And smartphone users are happy if they can navigate with just their thumbs. Responsive design can handle all of these by automatically adjusting the user experience as the size hits certain trigger points, or “viewports”.
Simply put, responsive design makes buying easy and seamless. It further strengthens consumer empowerment by automatically customizing the content of your website thus allowing the customer to enjoy the best buying experience from their favorite device.
Allowing your customer to make his purchase when and how he wants to communicates that you are valuing his time and preferences. Responsive design refocuses the content and content display of your website to cater to the customer’s device of choice, making the layout of your website adaptive—automatically adjusting at viewport/screen “breakpoints.” Meaning your customer’s experience of your website is optimized across ALL devices. This beats “small screen strategy” (which runs the risk of your website content being next to inaccessible because it just shrinks the website to fit a particular screen) and “mobile app strategy” (which runs the risk of sacrificing content and functionality that a customer may need to engage your product).
Responsive design is great because it marries both strategies into a concise, cohesive, forward-thinking approach. A customer doesn’t have to tediously “pinch and zoom” your website on his mobile browser nor does he have to lose valuable minutes going to the app store, looking for your app, downloading it, installing it and only then getting to use it—that doesn’t even include the time it takes for her to navigate through your product line, make his selection, and process her purchase.
Applying responsive design to your website lets the customer browse your site optimized for his device; lets him make his purchase unimpeded and uninterrupted—as easily and quickly as he would on his desktop or laptop.
by Adam M. | Jun 6, 2013 | eCommerce Platforms
Date:
June 11, 2013 | 6:30PM
Hoboken, NJ
6:30 – 7:00 Check-In
7:00 – 8:00 Dinner/Presentation/Q&A
8:00 – 9:00 Networking
Location
Babbio Center – Stevens Inst. of Technology
1 Castle Point Terrace
Hoboken, NJ 07030
eCommerce experts and retailers are coming together for an evening of discussions and networking focused on achieving greater online success. Attend and you will learn the tips and tricks leading retailers are using to optimize their eCommerce channel.
Attendees will walk away with valuable insights that will drive sales and customer engagement.
Discover what’s possible for your company in eCommerce.
Magento and partners Redstage, Celebros, ZeroLag and Emailvision will be available to answer your questions and provide practical advice.
Experts from Redstage will provide attendees with a “conversion audit” that will include suggestions for increasing conversion rates.
If you are willing to have your site used as an example at the event, please send an email to Redstage (amorris@redstage.com) and they will review your site prior to the event.
At the conclusion of the event, there will be a random drawing for a $1,000 voucher to Zerolag hosting services and a $2,000 voucher to an Emailvision Campaign Commander account!
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