Magento, Online Fashion Retailers & E-creation …

Magento & ChampagneAndLemonade.com

Magento seems to be taking over most of our working life now it seems! We were contacted by Isi (a friend of mine from 10 years ago down the pub) regarding some issues with getting her Magento website online … so it was E-creation to the rescue.

www.champagneandlemonade.com is a super-cool fashion retail site for pre-loved designer brands online.

Some of the usability tuning we applied included:

Adding some text on the ‘account login’ page to remind people that ‘You need to have activated your account by clicking the activate your account link in the confirmation e-mail when you first set up your account’.

Meta Content
Although meta content is playing a decreasingly important role in search engine positioning, a phrase such as “Pre-Loved Designer Fashion and Luxury Goods, Style Steals.” It makes sense to spend a bit of time looking at the specific values around specific search terms … something to ponder – they are the terms around the specific phrases you have outlined and the relative popularity with people searching in Google … (it’s a very very small portion of the research that really should be done).

Google Merchant
It is highly relevant to the luxury market because it will help you to be found when people are searching for very specific luxury brands. I can explain the logic to you on the phone but put simply, Google Merchant will make is easier for people to find a product you are selling if they are searching for ‘donna karen black ball dress’ as it will show in the ‘shopping results’ together with a price (well, within the variance of placement depending on the quality of your backlinks and descriptive text)

Sales e-mails:
The design of email communications needs to be more sophisticated – you can find our templates in Magento and I will send you examples of how I’d like them to look. Technically, it’s not built very well and needs to be tidied / smartened up. To try to keep within a budget, it should be kept simple.

Forms areas of the site and Accounts Pages:
they look really bog standard and in the case of the Sell area – we want the form to be in one line with clients easily inputting the info then clicking to add another item which will drop down another line. We need them to be able to submit multiple items in one go – not individually as it is now receiving one email per item – too complicated! – I will speak to Steve about coding this, as this is modification to functionality, which is not a problem but I need to get Steve’s opinion on this in terms of time. My plan is to provide a written spec/list once I have spoken to you to get confirmation from him. Great – thanks. Create an Account – when clients log in – they are sent an email which will activate their account but there is nothing to say that on the page- so it’s very confusing as once they have created an account – they are still locked out and re-directed to the log in page with no explanation, which they can’t get into. I’d like that to be changed so that when someone creates an account – they are automatically logged in on the site and I want to get rid of that need for them to validate their account via the email. – I have done a temporary fix which hopefully helps the current position. It should no longer send out the ‘click here to activate account’ e-mail. I did a basic test but didn’t want to charge my card again, so it’s not a 100% complete test, but even setting Magento “don’t require confirmation e-mail” does NOT address the issue, it just means that people can’t activate / get into their account! It’s not very smart at all – so there needs to be another solution in place. This is slightly complex to work out how to by-pass Magento’s core functionality. Yep – we need email validation so we agree with your earlier point directing users to activate their account via email. There is no acknowledgment on the site when people sign up for email updates (Top Right box on Home Page) – the page simply refreshes so people are not sure whether they have successfully signed up. I would like a “Thanks!” to show up in that box when they have inputted their email. – I can speak to Steve about best way to do this. This is pretty easy to do. Javascript box? Yes – please do. There is also no acknowledgement when people submit their items for sale in the “Sell” area – this needs to be changed also. – I can speak to Steve about best way to do this. Thanks. Add Google Analytics – very important and recommended. Tuning keywords – very important and recommended. Adding Google Shopping – important and recommended. 6/7/8 – as soon as the urgent fixes are sorted – we’ll deal with these.