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Read This Blog

Before we started offering our services to small business, we spent 25 years running our own, and clients, online businesses that sold products around the globe. In that time we explored many avenues, and trialed many options, to operate more efficiently, and effectively in the online world.

Read This Blog is our little contribution to helping SMEs understand and navigate the bottomless pit that is the online world.

What’s the best ecommerce platform?

Today I look at platforms beyond the marketing fluff to assess each, not only on their overall performance, but also on more important things like running costs, long term planning and flexibility.

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Facebook advertising – something smells

Unless you have been living under a rock for the past decade, you will know that the number one thing most marketers talk about is advertising on social media. And a good chunk of the time, that means Facebook advertising (which also now covers Instagram). The proposition is tantalising too, fully targeted advertising, right down to how often someone blows their nose. Your adverts will hit your target audience squarely in the face. So it was some years back that we had decided to start using the Facebook system to advertise our own products [we ran our own online based…

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Websites? What are you really getting?

Through the almost ubiquitous employ of backbones such as Wordpress, a dearth of out of the box add-on solutions have sprung up that all but remove what were once laborious jobs. As a result, sites are now faster and cheaper to build, and any Tom Dick or Harry thinks they can build a site.

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Payment Gateways – your options.

Your payment gateway can make or break your online store. ‘On page’ processing, processing consistency, perceived trust and card acceptance are all factors that can affect how a potential customer will feel about making their purchase, so it’s important to get it right.

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Offshoring, crowd sourcing and the unspoken cost folly

Be it for a website, documentation, coding or any number of things, the rise of the ‘crowd source economy’ and the easily accessible online marketplace’s where it ultimately about the cheapest quote, has changed they way many businesses think about sourcing skills for project work.

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You have to learn

To many, if not most, the online space is still a dark mysterious void. From our experience, clients may have a website but for the most part only a few have an idea of how it got there, or even how it works. None of this is helped by the fact that many website developers still like to keep what they do wrapped up in an air of mystery. This is especially true for online stores. But what if we were to say to you that in order to really succeed online, you have to have learn how to push…

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Brand Positioning

I recently read a blog post from a company regarding ‘Made in China’. Usually such posts come about as a statement responding to people’s reactions, good or bad, to what you are doing.

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Mega Menu – yes or no?

Web design, like everything, can be defined by trends that come and go. One of the more recent such trends, but one which has yet to pass, is the mega menu (or megamenu). While we are sure you have seen them, just in case your are not familiar, a mega menu is a deep, sometimes full width menu that holds a lot of navigational options. On more elaborate menus, the inclusion of images and additional site widgets are often a feature. We are going to be upfront here when we say we do not actively promote the use of a…

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In the times of social media, it’s time to reconsider the blog

But in the days of Social Media, is using a website, or blog, still a valid form of online promotion?

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The decomposition of the retail experience a.k.a shopping online FTW

Meanwhile, over at Target Chatswood, they just ditched all the checkout points and replaced them with, *ahem*, ‘self serve’ stations. Well OK, there was one token cash register for all those poor folk that don’t like the idea of checking out themselves – or are not able to.

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Woocommerce Interview

Experience from doing – Grab insights from an interview we did with Woocommerce about the work we had been doing for our then retail business.

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The ecommerce store owner’s guide

You’ve done some looking around, worked out what you can sell and finally decided you want to hop into the world of e-commerce. For many that’s enough and they dive into it without realising that, just like a bricks and mortar store, an online store requires every bit as much effort, possibly more, than its analogue counterpart.

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Online assets, do you have control?

Would you let someone else control your postal mail or bank accounts? If you answered ‘no way’, yet have someone outside your business controlling your domain, email etc. etc. – your online assets, then you need to read on…

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