Category: Entrepreneurship

How to Create a Custom Site UX

Websites are designed for the visitors. But all visitors aren’t equal. There are UX best practices that make sure your website is user-friendly. But best practices also have their limits. No matter how you design your website, half the people will have a different opinion regarding the details.

Do you have a sleek and beautiful dark theme on your website? Someone will find that it’s too dark for their eyes. You have created a sign in option so that your customer can save their preferences? Wait till you meet the ones, who will refuse to buy from you simply because they don’t want to remember another username and password.

You might settle for what 80% your potential viewers would like. But there are several problems with that. First of all, how would you know what they like? Running an A/B testing for every element of a site would be an overkill. Also, why would you want to annoy the rest 20%?

It may seem like there’s no way out of it. Actually, there is. At least to some extent.

What about you let the visitors customize your site according to their preferences? It that possible?

We all know your visitors are not web designers. And (even if some of them are) they have neither the time nor the inclination. We are not talking about customization in a broader sense.

There are some elements of a website that you can safely leave to the hands of your visitors. In other words, you can let them customize some features of the UX.

Let’s see how.

Themes

Many people find light themes tiring and stressful on the eye. If your site has a lot of content that you want your visitors to read then it’s best to have two colour themes for your site. One light and one dark.

Now, you may think it’s almost like designing two different looking sites. But it’s not. If you begin with the double theme idea from the start, the design process won’t be that difficult. If planned in a proper way, some simple CSS rules would suffice to change the theme of your site in just one click.

Privacy

If you have an eCommerce site you definitely want your customers to create an account. That way you can store their preferences, send them customized offers, gather data about product popularity and what not. But some of your customers may not like it.

For them, you should add the option of checking out as guest buyers. It’s good if your customers sign up but don’t push them if they don’t want to.

In general, if your site requires creating profiles, let your users decide whether their profiles will be public or private. The more privacy customization you offer to your users the more they will trust you and feel comfortable on your website.

Fonts

The size and type of fonts matter a lot in terms of usability. So letting the user change those can be a good customization feature for your site. It’ll be especially helpful for blogs.

You don’t need to give the users too many options regarding font type. Font size is more important. One serif font and another sans-serif font with about 3 / 4 size options should be enough. A small floating toolbar is a great way to show these options to the users.

Language

Not all sites need to have multi-language. But if your site has more than one language, let your users chose the language they want. In other words, don’t predict. Many multilingual sites determine the language to display by the location of the users. This is no longer a good UX practice. What if your visitor is using a VPN? Or what if someone is visiting your site from France but wants to see it in English?

One way to get around this issue is to the ask the users to select a language when they visit your site for the first time. Another way is to place the language options at a prominent place on the site. So that, if someone wants a separate language than what is displayed by default, they can change it easily.

Arrangement

It wouldn’t be practical to let the users change the way your site places different elements. But there are some things that you can let them arrange in their own ways.

We are talking about the presentation of information here. For example: In an eCommerce site, you should let the visitors arrange the products according to item type, release date or any other criteria. Similar customized sorting options can be provided for other information on your site.

Making a website customized requires you to plan early. If you design your websites keeping customization in mind from the beginning, it won’t cause that much extra effort. But it will definitely improve the UX of your website.

This article is a guest post by Amio Galib Chowdhury. Amio is a content writer for WebAlive, a team of Melbourne web designers and developers. You can follow us on Twitter @webalive

How To Use Dropshipping To Quick-Launch Your Business

The decision to launch a business should never be taken overnight. It is important for an entrepreneurs to weigh all the pros and cons and assess the potential risks before taking the plunge. While proper planning is without doubt essential for launching a successful business, it is also true that one of the key differences between “wantrapreneurs” and “entrepreneurs” is the latter’s ability to take the plunge without wasting too much time in deliberation.

That however can be tricky because it is not always easy to set up the various systems and processes required to start your business. If you are an eCommerce retailer, you may be required to establish partnerships to source your products, find distributors and work out your logistics well before you sell your first product online. That can be several months of work. For a bootstrapped entrepreneur, this can be a huge barrier to entry.

Dropshipping is a fantastic model that helps entrepreneurs do away with all the red tape and launch a business quickly and efficiently. This is essentially the use of third party businesses to make and sell your products. In other words, your job, is to merely promote your dropshipping business and get the sales going. The responsibility of making the products and fulfilling these orders lies with the dropshipper.

How To Start A Dropshipping Business

The biggest challenge in launching a dropshipping-based eCommerce business is finding a good and reliable dropshipper. This is because the reliability and trustworthiness of your dropshipper can directly make or break your brand. You could start by searching Google for dropshippers for your industry. Alternately, you may also look up for suppliers on websites like Alibaba and ThomasNet and call them up to know if they can dropship your product. It’s a long, boring process, but can be done.

Alternately, you may also make use of third party tools to look up dropshippers for your industry. Shopify recently announced the acquisition of an app called Oberlo that makes it extremely easy to click and add dropshipped products to your eCommerce store. This can bring down the time spent in researching dropshippers from several hours (or days) into a matter of minutes.

Once you have identified the right products to dropship, it is merely a matter of aggregating these products on to your eCommerce store. You are ready to promote your business from here.

Promoting A Dropshipping Business

Promoting a dropshipping store is not very different from marketing any other type of business. But there are a few caveats to keep note of. Firstly, your brand equity hinges a lot on the dropshipper you work with. If you are sourcing products from a Chinese supplier, you must be aware of the lengthy shipping times from China to your customer in the US, UK or any other part of the world. It is important to keep your customers in the loop about the shipping time in order to protect yourself from high number of chargebacks.

If you see a steady number of orders from your customers, a good idea is to hire a domestic freight forwarding company to hold the inventory from your dropshipper and fulfil orders from this domestic warehouse. This can increase your costs and in a dropshipping model where your margins are already thin, this strategy is however not recommended to all dropshipping businesses.

A lot of eCommerce entrepreneurs look at dropshipping as a stop-gap measure before they procure and fulfill orders themselves. But it needs to be pointed out that eCommerce can be a logistical nightmare that can suck in a lot of working capital and bring down your profits significantly. Dropshipping can keep your overheads low and help you scale your business seamlessly. As an entrepreneur, you must however keep an eye on your contracts and make sure that you get a price that is commensurate to the order volume. This is the only way to scale up a dropshipping business while increasing your margins at the same time.

Author Bio: Andrew Morris is the founder of Flicmedia, a UK based business marketing agency that helps small and medium businesses improve online reputation and grow their business.