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Website Checklist

By on March 6, 2012 in Web Development

You have hired a company to build your website and it is ready to go live. STOP! Have you checked their work to make  sure they did everything right? Have you tested the functionality of the website to make sure everything works as expected. Many people neglect this process, only to realize later on that the website development company made mistakes, and the website development company cannot provide any more services without more money. Prior to writing that last check, make sure to use the following website checklist to make sure all is in order with your website.

Website Checklist

-Check the site yourself to ensure everything is working properly

-Check functionality. For an eCommerce site, check the following for functionality

  1. Make sure items you have added in the shopping cart add up accordingly.
  2. Verify that tax calculations are correct
  3. Validate credit card transactions to see if payments are being processed correctly.
  4. Make sure that payments are conducted under a secure mode by seeing https:// rather than http:// in the address bar.
  5. After a payment has been processed, make sure customers receive an email thanking them for their shopping. This provides more security for the end user.

-Make sure the links are going where they are supposed to go.

-Make sure anchor text is directing the user to the correct page.

-Visit your website using different internet browsers to check for browser compatibility.

-Check that design elements are aligned, including logos and text.

-Make sure the website does not jump when navigating through different pages.

-Definitely perform a spelling and grammar check.

Although the website checklist may seem easy, many companies do not have a quality assurance or quality control system implemented. Even if the company uses testers they won’t necessarily see what is important to you. At Softway Solutions we have various people ensuring that the final work we present to the client is error and bug free. To get a quote for your website, visit us at www.softwaysolutions.com or call 281.914.4381.

 

 

 

 

 

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Top 5 ECommerce Pricing Models

By on November 21, 2011 in Ecommerce Web Design

Top 5 Ecommerce Pricing Models

1. Revolving Pricing Model
A revolving pricing model is most commonly used for subscription based services. The key sign of a subscription is: consistent content delivery. This means you deliver fresh content daily, weekly, monthly and so on. Seeing as how your product is delivered on a schedule it only makes sense to charge your customers on a schedule. Does it have to be the same schedule? Absolutely not! Plenty of subscriptions offer many revolving pricing options. These can be monthly, annually, semi-annually or anything your customers desire.

 

2. One-Time Charge Pricing Model
The one-time charge model can be a slippery slope. If you are considering it, make sure you run a lot of numbers before you commit to it. Meaning, the ROI must be there or else you will not be in business long. One-time charge models work for mobile apps, audio downloads and Egreeting-cards. Let’s think about the mobile apps specifically. Here at Softway we build a lot of mobile apps so we have a good understanding how much money goes into making each one. If you are going to release them on IPhone and Android you need to have a strong marketing plan to ensure the ROI because this won’t be cheap.

 

3. Usage-Based Pricing Model
The usage-based pricing model is exactly what it sounds like. This is becoming very popular for energy companies and internet companies and has always been a favorite of cell-phone providers. For ecommerce, let’s say your product is one like GoToMeeting. They don’t offer use a usage-based pricing model but they very easily could, and in my opinion they should. It is an option they could offer to smaller businesses that only need their services ever so often. They could keep your billing information on-hand and charge you a set price for each session used in that billing period. Or, charge you for ten sessions up front and then you use them whenever you need to.

 

4. Freemium Pricing Model
This is mostly seen in social sites like Linkedin and Spotify. Both of these offer a free account and premium accounts (free-mium). The idea here is that once your customers immerse themselves in your free services, they will want to pay more to get all of the services. Both Linkedin and Spotify’s premium services charge a monthly revolving price and Linkedin actually has a few premium services that are tailored to different audiences. Spotify gets you on the commercials; you pay more and there are no commercials.

 

5. Tiered Pricing Model

Now here’s where things get a little tricky. Let’s say you are selling a tangible product that has to be packaged and shipped. This product is one that you buy in bulk from a manufacturer and re-distribute. Because you buy in bulk, you get price breaks. With a tiered pricing model you are basically passing along those price breaks. Meaning, the price for one product is not going to be the same cost per item if the consumer wants to purchase 10.  A lot of subscription based services offer tiered pricing as well; if you pay for a year up-front it is cheaper than paying month-to-month. Tunecore is an ecommerce service that distributes music and video content to all of the go-to digital marketplaces for anyone and everyone. Sign-up, choose your product (or bundled product package at a discount), upload your content and select which stores you want it to be sold in.  Within 48 hours your content is being sold on your selected markets and then 60 days later you can start cashing in the checks.

These ecommerce pricing models are not new and innovative models; they are simply recycled from the tried and true and formatted for the ecommerce business model. After you decide exactly how you want to charge for you service or product it is up to you to implement this pricing model. If you are building the ecommerce site yourself then you need to do a lot of research on building a paywall because inside that paywall will be your pricing model. If you feel you are already over your head, contact Softway Solutions and our expert team will build, implement and even maintain your ecommerce portal for you.

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Subscription Based Ecommerce Solutions

By on May 29, 2009 in Ecommerce Web Design

Some of the most successfull ecommerce websites are subscribtion based ecommerce websites. There are numerous subscription model ecommerce websites sprouting up quite recently and are also quite successful.

The trick is to provide a service that will help in incurring a recurring income. The advantages are that once an effort is made to sell a subscription, that one time sale guarantees a residual income through the life of the account. Over a period of time the revenue could grow and the ecommerce site / solution can become very lucrative.

Before you decide to design and build a subscription based Ecommerce website. Keep the followin things in mind.

1) Provide / Render a service through the site that is of value and useful to the customer
2) Keep the cost of the subscription reasonably priced with amounts such as $ 4.95, $9.95 or such to help keep the subscription amount being noticable on the credit card statements of the customer.
3) Keep upgrading the services and add new features regularly to keep the subscriptions alive and attract new users.
4) Use Viral Marketing techniques to promote your subscription service and enable the users to virally spread your service by enabling shares to popular networking platforms.

These are just some good points to keep in mind to help you create your next Subscription based ecommerce website. If you would like to learn more about services that Softway Solutions offers with respect to ecommerce services you can visit our Ecommerce website design page and or visit www.softwaysolutions.com to learn more about the different services that our team can help you with.

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