This might sound rather too much like common sense, but an e-commerce website should be focused upon presenting products and services to customers in order to generating sales. If products & services are presented right from the start on the home page, this makes a big difference in sales.
I serious try to discourage people from using the home page to post content that is generally found in the "About Us" or "Company info" pages. It’s simply best to get down to business and promote products and services right from the get go.
Customers are looking for available products and services, they are not visiting e-commerce websites with the thoughts of forming a business relationship. The same applies to the physical world.
When you walk into a brick and mortar retail store, you don’t have somebody standing at the door passing out company brochures. However, there might be a stack of sales flyers near bye. Many retail stores/shops merchandise new and sales items in highly visible and/or well trafficked areas.
I always recommend that it’s better to focus upon marketing products/services on the home page instead of using it to market the business itself.
Here are the Top 4 modifications to the iHTML Merchant home page that I personally recommend to do just this.
- Product Specials
- New Items
- Featured (if available)
- Top or Best Sellers
1. Product Specials
While the iHTML Merchant provides a specials.ihtml page to display all products on special. I recommend displaying a small selection of items currently on sale/special on the home page. There are some different ways you can go about this too. Generally speaking the display of 3-4 items with thumbnail images works the best.
- Select a limited number random items flagged a being on special.
- Select the top 3-4 items most recently added that are on special.
You can do this by using "WHERE active=1 AND special=1 ORDER by product.id DESC" in the SQL statement. Don’t forget to add any other required filters to the WHERE clause such as show zero stock display control.
- Select the top 3-4 items most recently added that are on special with highest amount of sales, or least amount of sales. Requires including the orderdetail in your FROM clause, and "Sum(orderdetail.qty) as totalqty" in your SELECT statement and ORDER BY totalqty DESC|ASC. The use of DESC or ASC determines if you return the best or least selling products on special.
- You can always post the TOP 3-4 items using the default product order display as set in the merchant product order display configuration. I generally recommend using some other method.
Example MS SQL Sever Query
This SQL code should fetch TOP 3 recently added products that are on special. You might need to tweak it up some to meet your special needs.SELECT top 3 id, name, thumbnail, code, cost, retail, unit, sell, isstock, stock FROM products WHERE special=1 AND active=1 AND thumbnail<>’none’ AND storeid=:storeid ORDER by id DESC
Notice I’m only selecting items that have thumbnails because of the visual presentation aspects. Products with imagines have more appeal for driving sales.
You can add a "see more specials" link to the specials.ihtml page for a full listing of items on special. It’s simply the goal here to display a few items on the home page.
2. New Items
- You can generally applies the same concepts/ideas that I presented above. However, I generally try to work the SQL queries to display the actual newly listed items, or randomly display from the last top 10 products added to the system. Selecting the top 10 product record ID in DESC order WHERE special=1 and selecting a TOP 3 Random records from that generally works. I’m just giving you an idea what is involved in building the SQL Queries to pull this off.
Example MS SQL Sever Query
This SQL code should fetch TOP 3 recently added products that are flagged as New. You might need to tweak it up some to meet your special needs.SELECT top 3 id, name, thumbnail, code, cost, retail, unit, sell, isstock, stock FROM products WHERE imnew=1 AND active=1 AND thumbnail<>’none’ AND storeid=:storeid ORDER by id DESC
Again only selecting items that have thumbnails.
3. Featured items
- Apply the some of the ideas/concepts I’ve presented for Product Specials and New Items. Perhaps sit and brainstorm for some other creative ways as well.
Example MS SQL Sever Query
This SQL code should fetch TOP 3 recently added products that are featured. Again you’ll need to tweak this up some.SELECT top 3 id, name, thumbnail, code, cost, retail, unit, sell, isstock, stock FROM products WHERE featured=1 AND active=1 AND thumbnail<>’none’ AND storeid=:storeid ORDER by id DESC
4. Top or Besting Selling Products
This involves does an SQL Query on the TOP 10 or 5 products that have been sold on the website. using the SUM(orderdetail.qty) of products sold.
Example MS SQL Sever Query
SELECT TOP 5 p.id, p.name, SUM(od.qty – od.refundqty) AS total FROM orderdetail od, products p, orders o WHERE o.receiptnum != ‘rec0000′ AND o.id=od.ordid AND od.pid=p.id AND p.active=1 AND od.storeid=:storeid AND p.storeid=:storeid AND ((p.isstock=1 AND p.stock > 0) OR p.isstock=0) GROUP BY p.id, p.name ORDER BY total DESC
5. Editable Home Page Content (the hidden 5th Element)
This is not really a modification. It’s a matter of rethinking how to use the Home Page content editing feature. This is perhaps the most under used marketing feature.
Place the editable home page area in the middle top of your content area. Use this to insert any promotional graphics, flash animations into. Treat this like it’s prime real estate on the home page.
Use this for "Power Marketing". Some Power Marketing ideas;
- flash animations or professional graphics linking to specific products or services to "Power Market" to customers.
- Flash Animation or Professional graphics that enhance the asthetic appeal of the website. Eye candy that captures attention and gives the site a little ambience.
Some Real Life Examples
Here’s some real life examples of the concepts I’ve outlined in this article. Displaying Featured items, Items on special and etc.. along with a prime real estate area on the home page for "Power Marketing".
Musicians Friend
Lingerie Diva
K-mart
Comments
I’ve attempted to present a few general ideas as to how to transform iHTML Merchant Home pages into pages that market/promote the sales of products or services on the home page. The SQL Queries involved will depend upon the Database Server involved. Along with some creative ways you wish to fetch a sample of products to market.
When customers or new visitors come to the website, they are being marketed to right away. Plus these modifications dynamically/automatically are updated based on data entry.
