A “Landing Page” on your website. What is a landing page? A landing page is the first page a potential customer or client comes to when they “land” on your website or blog. What makes a good landing page? It depends on what your mission is. Do you sell products to the public? Do you sell business to business? Do you want people to participate in the discussion on your blog or forum? You have to decide what you want a person’s first impression to be and what you want to convey very quickly to a potential client or customer. You need a “call to action”.

Our two websites agathaandlouise.com and aandlhome.com are retail websites selling products to the public. Most of the “landing” pages on our website are either individual product pages or category pages. No matter what page you land on when you visit our websites you will see:

• Name of Our Business with Description of what we sell
• Our toll free 800 phone number (method of contacting us) is always visible in the upper right hand corner. So are the badges for the credit cards we accept and our SSL certificate signifying that our websites are secure.
• Our Navigation Bar is prominently displayed high on our website and provides very visible links to the: Home Page, Sale Page, About Us, What’s New, Customer Service, Blog, Contact.
• And (with the exception of a few non-shopping pages) you will see all the different categories of products clearly displayed on the left hand side of the website.

When we started our business we decided that our mission was to have a retail business where we sell products that we love and that we wanted to get to know our customers and in turn we wanted our customers to have the opportunity to know who we are and to be able to contact us. We have attempted to make every landing page on our website reflect this.

Here is an example of a landing page for a product on our website. If you google “Irish Terrier Charm” we are the number one organic result in google (as of October 24, 2009). If you click on our google result this is what you see:

A clear image of the charm, an accurate product description, the price of the charm, images of related Irish Terrier products (which are actually links to those products), the ability to type in the engraving of your dogs name on the back of the charm with price (call to action), buttons to click to share on your social network (call to action), email a friend button (call to action) an add to cart button (call to action) and (on the left side of page) a list of all the different product categories.

This landing page provides multiple opportunities to make a customer or potential customer happy and satisfied. It allows them to purchase the charm, to have the charm engraved (what a nice personal touch and an unexpected surprise), to buy similar products, the ability to share the charm with their friends (via social network and email), and by seeing all the product categories they realize that we have much more to offer them than just a handful of Irish Terrier products.

Since the launching of our websites I have consulted with Bartlett Interactive multiple times to adjust and change the look of our website to enhance our landing pages and to improve the first impression of our website makes on potential customers. Here are some of the things I do to get the most out of my website:

• I listen to what our customers ask for.
• I google our products a lot to see where search results lead people to on our websites.
• I shop on our websites everyday to try to find errors or potential questions from customers.
• I read my blog everyday and I check links to make sure the links from our blog to our website work and are still live and work properly. *This is very important if you write a blog that links back to your website.

A good landing page is a “work” in progress. It can always be updated and adjusted. Don’t forget that. Remember your mission and provide a “call to action”. You’ll end up with more happy customers. Isn’t that every business owner’s “mission”?

Above all, we wish to avoid having a dissatisfied customer.
-Leon Leonwood Bean (founder of LL Bean)

"My business is local. I don't need a website". I have heard this from many fellow small business owners. Perhaps at one time this was true. But now you may want to reconsider this business philosophy. I recently had lunch with a good friend of mine who is expecting his first child with his wife. Due to their busy schedule they are doing most of their "new baby" supplies shopping on-line at night after dinner. He told me that they had recently purchased a new rocking chair (to rock their new baby asleep) on the internet and he said "we decided to buy it from a Maine based company. It was nice to be able to buy something local even though we are too busy to go to the store in person."

One of our most popular items on our website agathaandlouise.com are Puppia Harnesses. They are designed for small dogs and they are very soft so they tend to not rub against a dog's coat and leave marks on a dog's coat. Many local dog owners have discovered us because they simply Googled "Puppia Harness in Maine". Once we meet them guess what we often hear? "I'm so glad we found someone local".

We have countless examples of local people walking into our retail store (and now our showroom) with a shopping list of items from what they found on our website. They already know what they want. Why? Because they already shopped in our store before they walked in the door. Our store just happens to be on their computer in the comfort of their own home. For a retail business owner it doesn't get much better than that.

A website where local people can shop is one of the best customer service and sales tools available to you. Some small business owners have told me that they fear having people shop on their website would be impersonal and that they won't be able to establish relationships with their customers. We have had the exact opposite experience. Our website has brought us new customers and often times new friends. When designing our website we told Harry and Fletcher at Bartlett Interactive that we wanted an About Us page that had a photograph of us and that we wanted a page that conveyed to our potential customers something personal and honest about us. We don't want people to feel like that they are clicking on another website in the internet abyss...we want clients to know that - yes we are real people and yes we have a family too. In otherwords: You can have a personal relationship with us.

Remember local people search the web for products to buy. They are looking for answers to questions and many of your neighbors would love the opportunity to speak with and shop with someone in their community. Wouldn't you?

I have been quoted saying that, in the future, all companies will be Internet companies. I still believe that. More than ever, really.
--Andrew Grove (founder of Intel)

Gray
Agatha & Louise

Should I have an e-commerce website for my small business? That is a question I have been asked often lately. Many small businesses are realizing that having an e-commerce website is a perfect way for their current customers to shop with them and it can be an invaluable tool for reaching new customers.

We opened our retail store in May 2005 and literally the first day we opened our retail store our customers asked if we had a website. It was very quickly clear to us that a website was something our customers wanted. They loved our unique gifts for dog lovers and they wanted to shop with us from the comfort of their own home.

I contacted Harry Bartlett at Bartlett Interactive in late summer 2005 and I told him that we were interested in having an e-commerce website for our business. I was quick to tell Harry that we knew very little about websites and that I wasn’t sure what a website would require from us. The truth is I thought attaching a document to an email was a “big deal”.

The first thing Harry suggested was that we answer all the questions on Bartlett ’s E-Commerce Project Profile. The Project Profile covers the many aspects of having an e-commerce website from:

• What are your goals from having an e-commerce website?
• How will you market it?
• How will your site be maintained? Why is this important?

An e-commerce website takes a lot time to build and maintain and this can be expensive if you’re not doing it yourself.

Our e-commerce website, Agatha & Louise launched in June 2006 and Bartlett has helped our business grow in the four years since. Fletcher has been our primary contact. We’ve never actually met Fletcher face to face; all of our communication is via phone and internet.

A month ago we launched our second website, A&L Home and closed our brick and mortar retail store in Portland Maine ’s Old Port. We now have an office in the Old Port where we manage our two websites: www.agathaandlouise.com and www.aandlhome.com.

The Internet will help achieve "friction free capitalism" by putting buyer and seller in direct contact and providing more information to both about each other.  --Bill Gates

Gray
Agatha & Louise

Gray and his wife Persephone own Agatha & Louise and A&L Home, two internet businesses based in Portland, Maine. From time to time he writes entries on the Grow Blog to discuss small business and to share what is involved with having an e-commerce website (or two websites).

Questions to ask before choosing an e-commerce platform.

Buying software from small businesses is often a roll of the dice. One of the added problems of evaluating e-commerce software is it's difficult to get honest, 'real' reviews. Much of the information online is biased commentary, disguised as genuine. The only way to really know is to actually use the programs or delve deep into forums for specific comparisons.
Here are a few questions to ask before making a commitment:

What version is the software? If it's v1.3 then avoid it at all costs. The higher the version the better.

How large is the software company? There is much more chance that software from Adobe will be around in 5 years than a 5 person software company's will be. If you commit to an e-commerce platform and the company goes away, so does most of your investment.

Open source or commercial software? Buying open source ensures you have access to the code but also means you will be relying on a web developer for maintenance and upgrades. Since e-commerce software is changing rapidly, choosing open source can be a more costly choice.

What marketing features does the software have? Using a platform such as ProStores, owned by eBay, has the added advantage of being pre-integrated with one of the largest online shopping networks around. Leveraging other marketing programs such as SEO and e-mail integration are critical to the success of an online store.

Can any user interface design be used? Often e-commerce software restricts the 'look + feel' of a website design. Check to see how restrictive the template system is or if you can develop your own template.

For a more comprehensive list of questions to ask before purchasing e-commerce software, see our 'E-commerce Project Profile: Questions that help define the strategic goals and scope of an e-commerce project'.

QUESTIONS TO HELP DEFINE THE GOALS OF AN E-COMMERCE PROJECT
 
The following questions will provide a foundation for understanding therequirements for building an e-commerce website.Read more

• OBJECTIVES
• CORPORATE PROFILE
• SALES
• AUDIENCE
• CONTENT/FUNCTIONALITY
• E-COMMERCE
• MARKETING
• MAINTENANCE
• APPROVAL PROCESS