We are pleased to announce that we have rolled out the first beta of a follow-on project for www.woozie.com.  The owners of the site were interested in finding ways to visualize some of their sales data.  They wanted a way to easily determine where they were and were not making sales and who was buying.  They also wanted a quick way to dump the data to Excel to make graphs and charts of their own.  Most importantly, they wanted to be able to pick date ranges for the sales data they were looking at.  We used a couple of different technologies to make this happen.   We used the flot library to create some great looking graphs on the fly.  We also used the Google Chart Tools API to create a nice heat map of the US to show where sales are and are not being made.  We plan on making these features even more interactive in the days to come.  If you are interested in looking at your E-Commerce data in different ways, let us know.  Whether you want to get the most out of your data for your own store or you want to be able to quickly identify trends and impress your boss, Aries Multimedia can help!

Everyone in the small business community has heard the word E-Commerce.  In fact, E-Commerce makes up a big part of what we do here at Aries Multimedia.  For new small business, or small business who have yet to expand their web presence into the world of E-Commerce, the word itself can be daunting.  What does it mean?  Do all businesses need to have an e-commerce component?  What can e-commerce add to my existing business or to my business idea?  Well, we’d like to share some of the insights we have from helping many small business get into the world of E-Commerce.  This is a giant topic, too big to cover comprehensively in one blog, and so big that thousands of books have been written about it.  We’ll try to give you a run-down of some e-commerce related information that our clients have found useful.  If you have any questions, please either comment on this post, or contact us.

The first question we must address is “what exactly is e-commerce”?  Well, basically, it’s all of the things that you might try to do on a website to try to connect with your customers.  The most basic function of e-commerce is to directly sell your products to your customers.  We will deal with the issues involved in setting up a great web-based store in a blog post later on this week, but for now we will note that setting up your web based store is not the only piece of the e-commerce puzzle.  To illustrate this point, let’s do a thought experiment.

Imagine that you want to open a bakery.  You buy or rent some space, you decorate it to make it look the way you want, and you start baking and selling your goods.  On the internet, this is like procuring hosting (the building), building a web page with a good design (the decorating), and setting up a web store (selling your baked goods).  Now how do you get people in your store?  Well, if you have a real-world store, you’re probably in an area where people walk or drive by fairly regularly and you have a nice sign out front.  Therefore, just by opening up your bakery, you might generate some sales.   However, on the internet, your store is practically invisible to people who may be looking for exactly what you’re selling.  Furthermore, you’re not only competing with bakeries in your town, but you’re also competing with bakeries all across the world.  To be successful, you need to get the word out about your site.  This brings us to the second ingredient of an e-commerce venture: marketing.  We will address some marketing strategies in upcoming blog entries.  Of course, Aries Multimedia can help you formulate a winning marketing strategy and help you get customers through your doors.  So right now, we have two pieces of the e-commerce pie: marketing and the web-store itself.   We’re not done yet, though.

Let’s continue with our bakery example.  Let’s say that you’ve built your store (or website) and have put the word out that you’re open for business.   There’s one more piece of the puzzle that can help make your web-based business successful: knowing your customers.  Knowing who is buying from you and who isn’t buying from you is important in any business, and web-based business are no different.  However, with a properly set up web-based business, you can generate huge amounts of data about your customers and potential customers.  You can gear your store towards the likes and dislikes of groups of people, open yourself up to new markets and new customers, and keep a very close eye on efficiency, costs, and sales.  Aries Multimedia, with a wealth of mathematical skill and the ability to crunch numbers to answer any question about your business, is uniquely positioned to help you gather and make sense of the data that will help you make your business run at its full potential.

We have now identified three main aspects of e-commerce: setting up a system to make sales, marketing your products, and studying your customers.  All of these things are important to traditional business, and all are important to a successful e-commerce strategy as well.  Keep an eye on this blog in the next few weeks for more on these topics, and as always, please let us know if you have any questions.  We’d love to help you set up your new e-commerce venture or help you get the most out of your current online business.  Contact us for free initial consultation and proposal and let us help you help your business take off!

At Aries Multimedia, we like to keep on top of what our customers want.  We’re excited to announce that we are now offering web design templates for sale through our site.  If you just need a good design idea to get started on your site, take a look at what we have available.  You can spend a relatively small amount of money and get a quality design.  You can also spend more money to get the design and have it removed from the site permanently.  No one will be able to buy that template again!  Of course, if you need any assistance on anything from ordering a domain name and hosting to intelligently placing content in your designs, just let us know and we can help you out.  In the mean time, happy template browsing!