Easy iShop
www.easyishop.co.uk
Easyishop is the flagship of a broad range of electric accessories based ecommerce websites like easylaptopshop.co.uk and easypsp.co.uk. They wanted to expanded into the already crowded iPod accessories supply market with a website that would become an established base for users to go to and would use all the best-of practises in the industry in order to attract paying customers to their website.
The Requirements
- Website to create a unique style that can be easily repeated on future sites in order to build a strong brand name.
- To perform Competitor analysis to see where their strengths laid and to use that information to boost the site.
- A blog to keep the public informed of the latest developments within the site and the industry
- Be able to keep in constant contact with new and former customers of the website.
- To come near and at the top of Search Engine Results for the keywords of this site.
- Be able to join with other websites in link building exercises in order to promote each other.
- Moving Hosting Companies without having any duplicate orders or downtime(offline) on the website.
Challenges to the ecommerce website development team
- The website is perfectly visible in 800*600 screens which is considered the minimum browser standards used by people
- Setting up a blog to work off the sub-domain of easyishop.co.uk at blog.easyishop.co.uk
- Moving the site from one hosting package to another. Normally this results in the old site be offline for a period of time while the new sites location is spreading around the world(normally 2-3 days with DNS, the glue of the internet). Otherwise if someone was to have the website running on both the old and the new location(to prevent downtime), then there is the issue of multiple orders, or orders being spread over multiple sites. Solution found allowed the busy site take orders even during the changeover without problems.
- Creating of Feeds: We created a script that will update 5 of the most common shopping sites with the details of all the products. They include Froogle, Kelkoo, Nextag, PriceRunner and shopping.co.uk. Every day, easyishop products are updated on each of the websites automatically without any intervention needed by easyishop. These sites are online comparison shopping communities where the customer can quickly look at 1000s of reviews and products to reach an informed choice and, as a result, drives much higher conversion to sale and value for easyishop.
- Creating user friendly URLs so ones like http://easyishop.co.uk/product.php?xProd=718&xSec=82 will be turned into http://easyishop.co.uk/product.php/718/82/clearance-products/ . This creates a more user friendly URL for the end user and also imparts some information to them.
SEO Search Engine optimisation techniques
This aspect of the development was considered essential to the success of the website. Building an ecommerce site is about 50% of the process of actually setting one up. Without establishing an online presence and letting your potential customers know you exist, then your venture will fail. To this end, we understood the following:
- Conducting a Site analysis with SEO experts to see any potential areas we could improve in. Based on a 40 point document, we implemented them for easyishop. There was an immediate effect on the ranking.
- Link Building and Affiliates: Easyishop is connected to a broad range of related websites. Each website contains a link to every other website, hence giving each website a small boost in search page ranking that grow over time, as the sites become more successful.
- Blog: useful,. Direct more traffic, shows him up as an expert in his field.
- URL Rewrite: The URLs for each product contains the name of each product at the end of the URL. This information is optional, it does not need to be entered in by the user, but is key to SEO. The search engine picks us on the additional keyword and gives each page a small boast.
SEO Results
Typing the keywords "iPod accessories" into google returns 66million results with over 50 shops selling them. This reflects how busy this marketplace is. At the moment the shop is at spot 4 and still going up. More importantly, restricting the search to pages from the UK(the target market), it comes in fourth. For the keywords "IPod Accessories Cases Skins" it takes up the first 2 places on the google search engine. Google is not the only search engine. It comes first in the global MSN for "iPod accessories" and seventh in the yahoo search results for the UK market.
