The following tips and tricks have been generated by Ashop Commerce clients and Ashop Commerce staff to encourage the use of flexibility within the software.
These tips will help you to find ways a little out of the ordinary or simply a faster or more logical way of displaying functions within your storefront.
- Only place your main categories for search engine optimisation purposes in the top menu.
- Use the category rich text editor field to write a blurb about the category and to help optimisation.
- The more information describing who you are, how long you have been doing it and about your products the more likely people will buy from you.
- Upload more products than just your main product line, people like the choice even when other products are not of interest. Most feel more comfortable buying from department store size shops than boutique online stores, so make your store a one stop shop for all related products.
- When adding products or editing a page for example, it is faster and also safer if you make a mistake to have two admin panel windows open so you can save back to what you had.
- Try to organise your categories to only go two levels deep into your site, most visitors will click away with more than three levels.
- Occasionally set your screen resolution to 800 x 600 pixels, this will show you what a large percentage of the population see your website as. You may find that some images you have in the center section of your website are too wide and push the columns out.
- When designing your store, look around the internet for great colour combinations. A pleasant looking helps to keep your visitors coming back and browsing your store longer.
- If it is suitable, use your product titles within the listing description field as well, this is very powerful for gaining better rankings in search engines. The listing description field on your products also doubles as the meta description which search engines look at so it's very important to be relevant to that product.
- Utilise the custom column boxes to upload images or custom text, you can hyperlink these images and texts to important sections within your store such as a sales on certain items. This also makes your store look more professional with custom graphics.
- Your stores main table width should now be roughly 1000 pixels or 100% since the smaller resolution monitors and almost obsolete now. 800x600 res monitors are a thing of the past and your website will look a lot better and fit content better with a wider resolution. Do this from the themes editor.
- When grabbing an address in your store to use for a hyperlink, make sure you are using your correct domain name address rather than the link from “GO TO STORE MODE” in your admin. E.g. You should use www.yourdomainname.com/c/3455/nokia_phone.
- To make individual shipping prices per product, use the product variants with surcharges. Then make a free shipping option in the checkout.
- For every product in your store, add some related products and turn on the similar products. This is incredibly powerful for cross-linking within your store for important keywords like you product titles. Your optimisation for products will go through the roof.
- To remove tax on International shipping, write e.g. -15% in the tax settings for international countries. This will remove this percentage for all international orders during the checkout.
- To generate fantastic looking emails to your customers, simply create a custom page with all your graphics and copy and paste the centre section into Outlook, then make the custom page "offline". This will send your email as a great looking HTML document with all the images and text appearing with links to your website.
