Running an eCommerce website comes with its toll of responsibilities. One of the most important ones is website security.
Not taking all the necessary steps to keep your eCommerce website as secure as possible can have very serious consequences on your business.
As a general rule, there are 3 main elements to eCommerce website security. You should make sure you’re on top of them: (more…)
For those of you who are following us and keeping up with our company history, you know that we’ve setup a remote work environment and that we don’t have a physical office space any more. We mostly work virtually.
We’re using technology to communicate, collaborate, and achieve a lot! In particular, we use a bunch of web applications to do what we need to do and share what we want to share – some of them we’ve developed ourselves, some we’ve bought, and some are free. Project management, task management, time tracking, file sharing, chat, are just a few examples of what we handle through web apps.
But sometimes all these tools and technology just defeat the purpose. It kinda gets in the way. When you have a bunch of things you need done, but you don’t necessarily need to cooperate on these things, or track the time you spend on them, or be particularly organized, then there’s nothing better than a good old quick text document you use temporarily and discard when you’re done. As an example, here’s my to-do list from last Sunday (08/07): (more…)
In the United States, Post Office employees have a bad reputation. They’re notoriously unfriendly, cold, hostile and unhelpful. It’s hard to avoid feeling frustrated when you have to deal with arrogant staff – be it an employee of the Post Office, an abusive police officer, or a flight attendant who’s running his own little power trip on the passengers.
But then I ask myself – wouldn’t you also become angry, frustrated and bitter if you had a crappy job at a crappy organization? The work environment and the context you create within your company plays a major role in your staff’s happiness and professional satisfaction, which in turn is crucial to make your customers happy.
The Post Office doesn’t have a good context that would allow its employees and agents to thrive and be happy. And the atmosphere of bitterness spreads to the customers who don’t receive friendly customer service. If only you could be nice to people, they would put up with long waiting lines, complicated rules, and even expensive service! If the clerk apologizes for the wait and take the time to provide good customer service, that would make all the difference.
It’s so important to create a great company context where the members of your organization can strive and be happy. (more…)
When you go to a restaurant, what makes you enjoy the food is not just how good the food is. It’s the whole experience. What makes you come back again and recommend the place to others depends on much more than the quality of the food.
Tasty food and good wine will surely help. But the food is not enough to create great customer experience and to build a successful restaurant. The design of the place, the decoration, the tables and chairs, the music, the wait (or lack thereof), and in general all the elements that create a special atmosphere will have a significant impact.
Most of all, the restaurant’s staff will affect the success of the business more than any other factor. But for whatever reason this is the one thing so many restaurants don’t pay enough attention to. And that’s too bad. Often staff hiring and training is done too quickly in the restaurant industry.
The food tastes that much better when the staff is friendly, knowledgeable, and personal. What you want from your waiters is to be passionate and proud about the food they serve.
The same goes for most products and services. It’s not enough to have the best product in the world – you have to provide a great experience for your customers. Awesome customer service, flexible return/refund policy, and easy shopping experience is as important as the product itself. (more…)
“User success rates on e-commerce sites are only 56%, and most sites comply with only a third of documented usability guidelines. Given this, improving a site’s usability can substantially increase both sales and a site’s odds of survival.” From Did Poor Usability Kill E-Commerce? by Jakob Nielsen.
He also writes that “E-commerce sites lose almost half of their potential sales because users cannot use the site. In other words, with better usability, the average site could increase its current sales by 79% (calculated as the 44% of potential sales relative to the 56% of cases in which users currently succeed).”
Dear Content Thieves,
I recently stumbled upon one of the recent articles I’ve written here posted on one of your sites. There was no mention whatsoever of the original author. My content was posted on your site as if it was your own. Like if you had written it yourself.
At first I felt pretty angry – couldn’t you at the very least link back to the source?
I started thinking… how much of our content are you guys stealing and publishing as if it was your own? So I searched on Google for short extracts from some of our latest posts. The results were pretty astonishing! There are tons of content thieves like you out there! Much more than I’d expected.
Now it’s one thing if you quote someone and link back to the original source. That’s totally fine with me. But steal my content and publish it like if it was your own? That’s ugly, ain’t it?
If you think about it though, you’ll realize that being a content thief doesn’t really benefit you. When you steal content, or in general when you use someone else’s work like if it was your own (content, design, code, etc), you position yourself one step behind your competition.
By always copying and looking for other people’s stuff, you’re constantly trying to catch up with your competition. You’ll always stay a step behind.
If you want to make someone else’s content available on your site – just include a link to the source! Your readers will appreciate you more for it. You’ll gain credibility and your audience will widen. People like transparency and appreciate being exposed to new sources. They’ll come back to you for more, hoping they’ll discover some new sites and authors.
It just pays more to be honest.
Cheers!
Noam.
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While building Noam Design and helping other businesses take off, I’ve learned a thing or two about entrepreneurship and about developing a business. Here are 6 mistakes I find particularly hard for entrepreneurs to avoid: (more…)
It doesn’t really matter how much time you spend on something, right? The outcome is what matters. The results. Then why most service companies bill their clients by the hour? Is there a better way?
On the other hand, we know that businesses who charge their clients based on scope restrict themselves to working within stiff boundaries – which doesn’t work in a creative industry.
So is there another way? The solution we found here at Noam Design is to stop taking on client work and focus on our products instead.
So we’re not charging by the hour: it doesn’t matter how long it takes us to develop a Magento template or a CMS template! Time isn’t a factor when determining a product’s price. Quality, usefulness, and market demand are more important.
We’re not charging based on the scope of work either. Sometimes a product requires a huge amount of work, revisions, adjustments, etc while other products are developed in a breeze. All that is quite irrelevant though – only the end result matters. Is the product useful for our customers? Will someone get a good value by buying it? Do people need it? These are the questions that matter more. (more…)
No matter what your line of business is, there are always competitors. If you think your product is so unique that you have no competitors… well it’s time to wake up!
Many business starters try so hard to differentiate their product or service from the competition that they end up believing they have no competition. In fact, maybe it’s better that way!
The thing is that focusing on the competition too much will not help you create a great product. Don’t concentrate your efforts on how you can beat the competition by doing better, more, less, or different. That’s a waist of time. Worse than that, it interferes with your ability to create a great business.
It’s best to ignore the competition and focus on what matters: your product and customers. Which audience are you targeting? What problem are you solving? What’s the best way to solve that problem for your target audience? What is necessary and what is not?
So ignore the competition. Create your own thing instead.
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How much time someone has been doing something is no indication as to how good that person is at doing it! In all the different fields I have been involved in, I’ve met people who had tons of experience and really sucked while others had almost no experience but were really good.
It’s not the quantity of experience that matters – it’s the quality. In fact experience will interfere – people often get stiffer with experience. When you have a lot of experience in a field, you’re prone to continue doing things the way you’ve been doing them so far. It’s harder to adapt and to change.
No matter what your line of business is – adaptability and flexibility is an asset of the utmost importance. Especially if you’re a small business. Because speed and agility is an advantage you can leverage over the big guys. (more…)