Latest Blog posts from Zarr.com

How has the World Cup affected Internet Retail?

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Not only has the World Cup dominated the televisions of millions in Britain, it has also been the stimulation for many Internet searches.

New figures from Experian Hitwise show that 1 in 144 UK Internet searches were related to the World Cup. These searches have provided Internet users with easy access to purchasing all their World Cup requirements.

With warm weather and Retailers promoting substantial offers, sales of football memorabilia, alcohol and electrical goods were drastically boosted.

With England preparing to begin their World Cup journey, Retailers anticipated strong interest in football shirts, flags and other memorabilia. Sales of which soared by 32% to provide many with their supporting attire.

Recent figures from IMRG Capgemini e-Retail Sales Index show that the total online sales increased by 22% in May in comparison to that of the previous year. Providing a total spending of a staggering £4.5 billion online during the month of May, equivalent to £73 for every person in the UK, showing that e-commerce has reached its highest growth rate in two years.

A surge of new televisions for the World Cup’s kickoff also took place, raising the sales of electrical goods by 13%. Cameron McLean, general manager for merchant services at PayPal UK, said: “PayPal’s own research shows that consumer spending online has increased over the last few months. In the run up to the World Cup it is not surprising that electricals is one of the biggest growing sectors for the month, with more people spending money on LED and plasma-screen TVs. More generally we have seen that consumer confidence has been growing, with PayPal research showing that 43% of shoppers have increased the quality or quantity of what they’ve bought over the last 6 months. Young people in particular have increased their online spend with 37% treating themselves more now than six months ago. Overall it proves that online sales are going to be crucial for the retail sector as it emerges from the recession and returns to growth.”

With the World Cup being held in South Africa, many followers of the World Cup splashed out on travelling to the host country. According to Robin Goad, director of research at Experian Hitwise, “The massive spike in searches for South African Airways illustrates the appetite for last minute travel to watch the World Cup. There has also been an 85% increase in searches for flights to South Africa over the last couple of weeks”.

How the iPad will affect Website designers?

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With technology rapidly changing, there is no surprise that a computer now fits in the palm of your hands. The iPad being slimline, no bigger than a book and an easy way to access the Internet is unquestionably a must have accessory in 2010, but how accessible and practical is the iPad for a Website Designer?

The basic principle of design will always uphold however, with the iPad being touch screen seems to prove problematic with Website Designers when they have always been accustomed to working with a mouse. One aspect in which designers have questioned are the methods and techniques in which they would need to adopt in order to provide an accessible website for their clients and for prospective viewers. The iPad also does not support Flash, therefore a lot of designers will have to think hard about their target audience before alienating them with designs that will not accommodate their computers.

The iPad has the ability to view websites either in landscape or portrait mode. However, websites look and react differently when using the iPad. This, for designers, means that they would need to produce two completely different layouts in order to accommodate the iPad’s versatile fluidity. Majority of websites are designed and created in order to be viewed in landscape, so when the website is rotated to portrait, aspects of that site will become inaccessible to users, mainly being too small to access the links.

Designers use their fingers to access or edit details of Websites, this is when errors are likely to occur as fingers are a lot larger than the usual mouse cursor. Website design is largely based on usability and with the iPad that is yet to be greatly achieved. Seeing firsthand how inaccessible links can be has shown how much needs to be achieved from the iPad.

Benefits of using Twitter and Facebook for your business

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With times changing and modernising, isn’t it time we followed suit?

With Social Networking sites becoming more popular each day and with people excessively using sites such as Facebook and Twitter, businesses have found a new form of providing clients and potential clients with up to date promotions and a chance to promote their company for no additional costs.

Between November 2009 to present, businesses that have been using Facebook and Twitter to promote their company has exploded. Results from a recent survey by Marketing Charts show that an overwhelming 88% of marketers say that they are now using Social Media Networks to market their business. By using these Social Networking Sites a significant number of participants who used them to advertise their business found that marketing costs dropped when Social Media Marketing was implemented.

According to a study by Palo Alto Networks (a maker of firewall technology), there has been an increase of 250% in people using Twitter to get the word out about their company, sales and promotions.

According to Marketing Charts, the number of companies using Facebook for such tasks grew by 192%

What is Twitter?

Twitter is a Social Networking and Microblogging service that enables its users to send and read other user messages called tweets. In simplest terms, Twitter is a free service that allows you to say almost anything to anybody in 140 characters or less. It allows the user to network and communicate with contacts new and old. With 100 million users worldwide it is an excellent way to promoter your business.

What is Facebook?

Facebook is also a Social Networking Site which allows users to interact via the internet, where they can add friends, send messages, etc. Facebook provides over 400 million people with access to many blogs, businesses and advertisements.

Undoubtedly, one of the quickest and efficient means of advertising and promoting your company.

Processing payments using Google Checkout

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Google checkout allows customers to purchase products quickly and securely using just a single username and password. Also if you do take payments using Google checkout, your search engine listings will be highlighted with the Google checkout badge which will encourage existing Google checkout customers to click on your ad.

One disadvantage of using Google checkout is that the payment pages will take customers away from your website and onto the Google Checkout payment pages in order to process a payment. This can look a little unprofessional and put people off purchasing through your website. Also Google checkout only accepts US Dollars or British Pounds. It also defaults all payments to the currency of where your business address is registered, therefore you can’t display or process payments in other currencies.

Fees
Google checkout will charge you a transaction fee for every transaction that you process. The rate you will be charged will depend on the amount you processed during the prior calendar month. The table below gives you the current rates.

Monthly Sales Through Fee per Transaction
Google Checkout

0 – 1,500                              = 3.4% + 20p
1,500.01 – 6,000                  = 2.9% + 20p
6,000.01 – 15,000                = 2.4% + 20p
15,000.01 – 55,000              = 1.9% + 20p
55,000 +                              = 1.4% + 20p

There is no Setup, monthly or gateway fees and you won’t be charged to transfer funds from your Google Checkout account to your bank. Google Checkout processes Visa (including Visa Electron), MasterCard and Maestro (including Switch/Solo).

Refunds
Once you issue a refund, the refund cannot be cancelled. Google will send a refund notification email to the buyer. Google will return the variable portion of the transaction fee (1.5%) however they will retain the flat fee (15p)

Chargeback
Google uses proprietary fraud detection technology to protect sellers from unwarranted chargeback’s. In cases where you are found liable for a chargeback you will charged the full amount of the chargeback plus an additional £7 chargeback fee.

Setup time
In order to setup a Google checkout account you will be required to first create a Google account. Once you have created a Google account you will then be required to fill in an online registration form. This will require you to fill in all your business information and agree to the terms and conditions. Once you have completed all this information you will then be ready to process payments through Google checkout.

General tips for getting to the top of search engines

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In this blog post we will be giving you various tips that will help you to get to the top of the search engines. We’ll also give you some factors that are used to rank websites.

Tip 1
Try to purchase a domain name which matches the main search keyword for your website. For a large proportion of one or two word search terms, the first organic search result will be the <keyword>.com or .co.uk. For example:

a. Cheap flights
b. Britney Spears
c. Mortgages trousers
d. Recycle

These domain names can however be very expensive. For example “fly.co.uk” sold for £90,000 in 2007 and “cruises.co.uk” sold for £500,000. Although these are large amounts of money, for an established business it could generate many times this in income without any Pay Per Click and Sponsored link costs.

Tip 2
Ensure that if someone types in “yourdomain.com” that the user gets redirected to www.yourdomain.com. If Google starts to pick up and index pages from both www. And non www. Versions of your website then you could be seen as having duplicated content which in turn will lower your ranking.

Tip 3
Spend an extra few minutes on each page and write a good title tag, meta tag keywords and meta tag description. This will greatly improve your search engine ranking in the long term. If you would like to know how to write good Meta data then refer to a previous post that we did entitled “Optimizing your website using Meta Data”

Some Factors that are used to rank websites:

1. The age of your domain name. The more established your domain name is the higher preference search engines give it

2. When the site was first picked up by the search engines. The sooner the search engines pick up on your website the quicker they can rank it

3. If there are a lot of websites on the same IP address then the search engines may not trust your website and therefore penalise your search engine ranking.

4. If the website has ever had any “dodgy” content on it. If the website has had some dodgy content on it in the past then that will have a negative effect on the ranking

5. The number of times the domain name has changed ownership. If the domain name has changed ownership a lot this can have a negative effect on the sites ranking

6. Where the website is located. If it’s a .co.uk domain name (targeting UK) with the website hosted in the USA this can have a negative impact on your ranking

7. If your website doesn't have good content on it or has anything illegal or not trust worthy on it, this will have a negative impact on your search engine ranking

8. How fresh the content is. If the content on the website is fresh and updated regularly it will be ranked higher than if the content is old and not relevant

9. If the website has a high bounce-rate. i.e. how many people view just one page before leaving the site. If the bounce rate is large (above 65%) this will have a negative impact on your ranking.

10. If the website loads quickly or not. If the website loads quickly then this will have a positive impact on the ranking

11. If the HTML and technical structure of the HTML is “clean”. If the HTML and technical structure of the site is clean then this will improve the sites ranking

12. If the pages have unique title, Meta keywords and Meta description tags. If the Meta tags are unique and specific to the pages content this will improve the ranking.

13. Keywords usage in title tags and URL’s. If you use the keywords in the title tags and URL’s it will help to improve your ranking for those keywords

14. The use of keywords in image ALT and image TITLE tags of images. Using keywords for image alternative tags and image title tags will help to improve your ranking

15. If H1 and H2 tags are used in the structure of the page content. Using H1 and H2 tags in the structure of the page content will improve your ranking

16. If the website has been banned or blocked for using dodgy or banned SEO practices it is likely to be ranked lower

17. If the spelling and grammar of the content is accurate this will have a positive impact on the SEO ranking

18. The more relevant the text in incoming hyperlinks the better the effect it will have on your ranking

19. If you suddenly receive lots of new links to your website in a very short space of time, it would be extremely rare for this to happen organically and therefore if your website does receive a large amount of new inbound links very quickly it will ring alarm bells with the search engines and can impact your ranking.

20. If the text content is similar to pages from other domains it can have a negative impact on your ranking

Search Engine Optimization Tips

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Following on from our previous blog post entitled “Optimizing your website using Meta data”, we have put together a further list of search engine optimisation tips that you can use to help improve your search engine ranking. This blog post will expand on the tips that we gave on writing effective Meta titles, keywords and descriptions.

Search Engine Optimisation Tip 1 - Using a good structure for URL’s (Universal Resource Locators) - Making your websites listing in the search results appealing to people is where good meta title tags and descriptions are very beneficial. The green text at the bottom of the search results is the URL (specific location) of the page that the search engines have chosen as the most relevant for your website.

Tip: Getting your page URL’s in a good structure is much more likely to result in a person clicking on the link. It also makes the link easier to read out to someone or even to type in directly. Below is an example of a good URL structure and a not very good URL structure.

The search result above is in a good structure and is more likely to get clicked on that the structure of the result below. The one below is very obscure and doesn’t give the user any idea.

Ideally a dash should be used to split up the words within the URL, and you could group similar pages together in the same way you would when filing documents on your computer.

Tip: When creating a new webpage within a Zarr developed website, the new page will automatically be given an individual user friendly URL. If you are going to have a lot of pages on your website, try to group similar pages together. For example, for a page about selling online on the zarr website, it has been added to a folder called web design and then titled selling online. The URL for this page is /web-design/selling-online.aspx

Do’s and Don’ts for page URL’s
Do use meaningful names for pages that are relevant to that pages content
Don’t use very long URL’s and also avoid generic names such as “page1.html”
Do group pages into directories/folders to organise your content for you, and also your visitors to know where they are
Don’t duplicate keywords in URL’s
Do use nested directories if needed, e.g. /directory-1/directory-2/ but don’t go down more than 3 levels

Search Engine Optimisation Tip 2 - Having a useful 404 page – When a visitor tries to get to a page on your website that has moved, or no longer exists your web server will send out a “404 page” – this is the status code for a “page not found” page.

This page should try and guide the user back to the right place, or direct them to what they might have been looking for. Try to give them links to some of the main areas on your site, or failing that tell them to choose a menu item. Anything is better than losing a visitor completely.

A good example is: www.zarr.com/this-does-not-exist.aspx and you’ll see it gets redirected to www.zarr.com/site-updated.aspx

Search Engine Optimisation Tip 3 – Get people to link to your website – A key area that search engines use to rank a website is the links to it. The chances are people wouldn’t link to a website unless it has something worthwhile.

In recent years people have abused this by paying to obtain links to their website. This resulted in Google implementing a policy of penalising websites that pay for links. Despite this linking is still very important and there are many free directory sites, blogs and other related websites where you can leave or ask for a link back to your website.

Tip: Simple practices including emailing professional body websites, your customers, your suppliers etc and asking them to add a link from their website to yours. Also leaving comments on other people’s blogs will usually result in a link back to your website.

Search Engine Optimisation Tip 4 – Regularly adding new content to your website – Adding on new pages or extending existing pages is essential to keeping your website’s content fresh in the eyes of the search engines. Website that update their content regularly are more likely to be ranked higher than websites that contain out of date content.

Tip: You should ideally be looking to add at least 1 page of content a week. If you have an ecommerce website then adding a new product through the website would have the same result. For a professional services website, a page could be adding a press release on a new service you are offering.

It can be quite difficult to identify enough topics to write about and add new content about. One way to get around this problem is by having a blog on your website. A blog is effectively an online diary and are not meant to be written formally as you would with a conventional press release. They are more casual and therefore can be written quicker and are more appealing to update regularly. The content of a blog could be your own thoughts on a particular matter, any advice you can give to people or even commenting on a news article.

Tip: Don’t use a free blog such as blogspot.com, as having a URL of mycompany.blogspot.com will not give your website any measurable benefit. Having a URL of www.mycompany.com/blog is a much better solution and quickly improves your rankings and drive increased traffic to your website.

If you would like to find out more about blogs or any of the points touched upon in this article, then please contact Us and a member of our team will be happy to talk to you.

Summarizing Paypal, Google Checkout and Sage Pay as payment processing programs

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In this final post we will be summarizing Paypal, Google Checkout and Sage Pay as payment processing services. In our previous posts we looked at the individual benefits and drawbacks of each service. We will now summarize our findings and give our conclusion on which service we feel is the best and why.

Google checkout and Paypal are quicker to set up and neither have a monthly charge associated with them. They charge you per transaction that you process and therefore if you don’t use the service you won’t be charged. Sage pay on the other hand takes a little longer to set up and requires you to apply for an internet merchant number before you can use the service.

The main problem with Paypal and Google checkout is that they take you away from your website and onto their own payment pages to process transactions. This can look untidy and unprofessional. Sage Pay allows you to create your own payment pages within your website and allows customers to stay on your website throughout the whole checkout process.

Although Sage Pay charges a monthly amount, if you are processing up to 1000 transactions per month it works out much cheaper than both Paypal and Google checkout. For example Google checkout and Paypal charge 3.4% + 20p for every transaction that you process. Sage Pay charges £20 per month to process up to 1000 transactions. This works out as 2 pence per transaction. Therefore if you are going to be processing transactions regularly, Sage Pay is much more cost efficient. In order to get a sage pay account you do need to have an internet merchant account number and your bank will charge you around 2.5% per transaction. Please refer to the table below to see the costs involved for each payment processing program.

Amount to process	Sagepay	Google Checkout	Paypal
£10	£20 flat fee per month	34p + 20p	34p + 20p
£100	£20 flat fee per month	£3.40 + 20p	£3.40 + 20p
£500	£20 flat fee per month	£17 + 20p	£17 + 20p
£1000	£20 flat fee per month	£34 + 20p	£34 + 20p

* Based on processing up to 1000 transactions per month
* Paypal charges 3.4% per transaction + 20 pence charge
* Google Checkout charges 3.4% per transaction + 20 pence charge
* Sagepay charges a £20 flat fee for the month and your acquiring bank will charge you around 2.5% per transaction

In our experience we would recommend using Sage Pay as the main payment processing service. Not only is it far more cost effective, but by allowing you to customize the payment pages and stay on your website throughout the whole checkout process it enables you to give a more professional experience to the customer.

At Zarr we are able to integrate Paypal, Google Checkout or Sagepay into a website. Integrating Paypal or Google checkout can be done very quickly and potentially in the space of an afternoon. Sage Pay does take a little longer as the time involved to process an application can take 2 – 3 days. If you would like to discuss any of these payment methods and how Zarr could help you to integrate any of them into your website then please contact us and a member of our team will be happy to discuss your requirements.

Sage Pay

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Sage Pay Go with Direct integration enables customers to take card details on your own secure servers and then pass them to Sage Pay for authorisation and secure storage in a server-to server session that does not involve redirecting the shopper to Sage Pay’s payment pages.

The advantages of this method means you have complete control over the look and feel of your payment pages. Also from the customers perspective they never leave your website which helps to give the impression that the site is secure and professional.

In order integrate with Sage pay in this way it does require you to comply to strict guidelines to ensure that you are collecting, storing and transferring card data in a secure way. It also requires a 128-bit SSL certificate to secure your payment pages.

Fees
Sage Pay charge £20 per month for up to 1000 transactions per quarter and for merchants processing more than 1000 transactions per quarter, each transaction is charged at 10p with a minimum charge of £20 per month.

Refunds
Using my Sage Pay console you can refund the full or part of a transaction amount, as well as void a transaction. You can only make a refund to the same card details as the original transaction. You can’t refund if the card has expired or if the authorisation was not taken via sage pay. You can only void a transaction that hasn’t been sent for settlement. Voiding the transaction will cancel the transaction and not include it within the daily bank settlement file.

Chargeback’s
Sage Pay uses 3D secure authentication, which is an additional security measure that has been introduced by Visa and MasterCard as a more secure method of authenticating the shopper at the time of the transaction. The advantage of this is that as a vendor is the liability is shifted if the transaction later turns out to be fraudulent and you will not be responsible. This reduces the risk of chargeback’s however you need to double check with your merchant on any occasions that you believe the liability should have been shifted. There are also some cards that aren’t part of the scheme and as yet and there are no similar alternatives.

Setup Time
In order to setup a Sage Pay account you will first need to get an internet merchant account number. In order to get an Internet Merchant Account number you’ll need to apply for one with an acquiring bank. They may charge you for their services and there may be a sign-up fee of around £200 and day-to-day charges, which may be a fixed fee in the case of debit card transactions or a percentage of each transaction for credit cards. Normally it takes between 24 and 48 hours however there are some providers who can approve an internet merchant account in less than 24 hours.

Once you have had your internet account number approved, you will need to apply for an account. This will consist of filling in an online form covering your company details, contact details, merchant accounts, services, technical and billing. Once you have confirmed all your details to Sage Pay, they will confirm that the account has been created and that the account is ready for testing. Once you have completed all the necessary tests, sage pay will automatically set your account live and you can start processing payment through Sage Pay.

Paypal as a payment processing service

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Paypal allows customers to pay or get paid quickly and easily without sharing any financial information. As Paypal don’t share any financial information with sellers or retailer’s customers are better protected against fraud. Also because you don’t have to type in your card details each time you pay, it makes the checkout process a lot faster.

Paypal do take you to their own payment pages and therefore away from your website, however Paypal do have options to customise the payment pages with your corporate colours and logo. They also have an auto return facility that brings customers straight back to your website after they have paid.

Paypal also accepts multiple currencies, including: US Dollars, Canadian Dollars, Australian Dollars, Euros, Pounds Sterling, Yen, New Zealand Dollars, Swiss Francs, Hong Kong Dollars, Singapore Dollars, Swedish Kronor, Danish Kroner, Polish Zloty, Norwegian Kroner, Hungarian Forint, Czech Koruna, Israeli Shekels and Mexican Pesos. Paypal allows the seller to hold one currency balance and still accept payments in multiple currencies. Buyers can pay for purchases in their selected currency and the payment is automatically converted so the seller receives payments in their selected currency.

Fees
Paypal will charge you a transaction fee for every transaction that you process. The rate you will be charged will depend on the amount you processed during the prior calendar month. The table below gives you the current rates.

0 – 1,500                   = 3.4% + 20p
1,500.01 – 6,000         = 2.9% + 20p
6,000.01 – 15,000      = 2.4% + 20p
15,000.01 – 55,000     = 1.9% + 20p
55,000 +                    = 1.4% + 20p

Refunds
You can refund the entire amount of a transaction or portions of it. If you issue a refund within 60 days, the original transaction fee for receiving the payment is credited to your account. For partial refunds, you are credited a percentage of the original transaction fee based on the refunded amount. When you issue a refund after 60 days, your original transaction fee for receiving the payment is not credited to your account.

Chargeback
PayPal places a temporary hold on the chargeback amount from the seller's PayPal balance (the funds are frozen).

The seller and PayPal can work together to dispute the chargeback with the buyer's credit card company. While the chargeback is being disputed, PayPal will debit the seller’s account for the amount in question. If PayPal and the seller ultimately win the chargeback dispute, the credit card company will reimburse PayPal for the chargeback, and PayPal will transfer the recovered funds back to the seller.

Setup Time
In order to setup a Paypal account you will be required to create a Business account. This will first require you to fill in all of your business details and bank account information. Finally once you agree to the terms and conditions you will be able to process payments through Paypal.

Dont loose your domain name like Ryanair did

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Imagine if your domain name suddenly stopped working - your website would be inaccessible and customers would not be able to buy from you and no emails would reach you. It could cost you thousands of pounds in lost revenue and inconvenience very quickly.

This happened to Ryanair this afternoon. Nominet who oversee all .UK domain names suspended the Ryanair.co.uk domain name as they hadn't paid their renewal fee (see screen shot to right).

If you typed in www.ryanair.co.uk to a browser you got an general "website not found" error screen. If you sent an email, it bounced back immediately. Ryanair also "encourage" passengers flying to check-in online before they fly rather than pay to check-in at the airport. If the thousands of people flying with them this afternoon tried to check-in they wouldn't have been able to - very frustrating I would expect.

So why did Ryanair not renew their domain name when it expired on 11th August 2009? Probably an oversight, and for the few pounds a year it cost to reserve/renew a domain name, I'm sure the loss in revenue was many thousands of pounds more than that. Plus the embarassment - although they do love PR!

Nominet give domain owners a few months after a domain expires and tries to chase them to remind them of payment. If they don't want to renew, then thats fine, but rather than loosing a domain name completely, the domain stays active for a few months before being suspended - and then a few weeks afterwards it gets released back into the public domain for someone else to reserve - on a first come first served basis.

For all the domain names that Zarr oversee for our customers, we ensure that domain names do not expire so that things like the above do not happen.

We ensure that domain names that are wanted are set to auto-renew - something that Ryanair IT staff could have done in 30 seconds.

Zarr provide more than just web design. We have an extensive background in developing and supporting websites and help our customers keep their online businesses running 24x7. Ryanair, if you want a more reliable company to look after your domain names to avoid embarassments like today, give us a call on +44 1788 820900!

[Updated 22:05] I notice that someone has got their credit card out and paid for the domain name to be renewed so passengers can now get to the Ryanair.co.uk website again!