Website Marketing - Surefire Design

There are two major components to making your website sucessful.
One is getting people from your target market to you site.
The second is getting some form of conversion.

Your aim for conversion might be contact queries, bookings, sales, product enquiries.

The task this week is putting yourself in your customers shoes -

1 Pretend to be a customer and browse to your website home page.

2 Assess how clearly and quickly you can tell what services and products are on offer.

3 Assess how clear the call to action is. Is there clear instruction on what to do next? Examples might be - “Contact Us” “Enquire Here” “Order Online” “Buy Online”

4 Using the admin online editor, edit your text to clearly state your product/service, and give your customers a clear instruction on what to do next.

There are a daunting number of options for New Zealand retailers wanting to accept real time credit card transactions online.
To receive credit card payments you need some kind of payment gateway. Put simply a gateway is an organisation that accepts the credit card payment on your behalf and performs real time checking of the number name etc all online while the client is purchasing from you. Just as if they were in a shop using the eft-pos machine.

Here are brief descriptions of some of the options.

1 Paypal is the biggest international internet payment gateway. Paypal itself has a huge array of payment products ranging from requesting money from people by email, to buy now buttons and shopping carts operating directly from your website. Because of its size Paypal has reasonably good feee structures. With Paypal your money sits in your account with them, and you periodically download your earnings into a bank account of your specification. A separate Merchant Account (and the associated fees) with a traditional bank is not required for most options.

2 DPS is a New Zealand home grown payment gateway. Again there are a huge arrary of services. Payment Express is a Visa and MasterCard certified solution, developed by DPS, which allows electronic payments from multiple access points i.e. Web, EFTPOS, Vending, MOTO (Mail Order / Telephone Order) and Wireless.

3 Banks. Many of the New Zealand banks offer payment gateway services that can be custom integrated into your website along with their Merchant Account services. These systems are often the most expensive and have custom options when actually implementing into your website.