Snaply Blog

Of all the tutorial videos we’ve given you, there are few as important as this one: Managing manual orders.

Manual orders are something you may never have to deal with. You might not have manual payments enabled on your store or you may never choose to add an order yourself. That being said, you should still be prepared. This tutorial will guide you through all the possible steps of a manual order: How you see the order details, adding notes to the order, updating the order status and contacting the customer. It’s a biggie but a goodie!

I want some colour in my life!

That’s what you’re saying right? Today’s tutorial will be covering how to add that colour into your life by customising the layout of your store and changing the theme you want to use or the colours of your theme. Don’t worry, it’s not a difficult process – in fact, the video is pretty short by our standards!

One thing I hear from a lot of you is that you need somewhere to put up more information. The contact page isn’t enough and the product information pages aren’t enough, where else can you put info about you, your company or a simple hello message to your customers? The answer is custom pages.

With every one of our Snaply packages, you’re able to create a certain amount of custom pages to do with what you like. Some Snaply storeowners use a custom page as their homepage – a place to send their customers before their customers even see their products. Some use them simply to list delivery information. Now, you would like to do the same, but you don’t know how.

Today’s tutorial video will be covering how to add and activate custom pages on your Snaply store. Oh Snap!

Last weeks tutorials were very focused on getting your store up and running. By now, your products should all be in stock and your store should be open, waiting for eager customers to spend their money. Sometimes though, customers need a little bit more information or, they simply want to tell you what they think of your products. That’s where the Questions and Reviews sections come in.

The video today will guide you through the process of what you need to do when you receive a question or a review on one of your products. A definite must watch for any storeowner!

A lot of our focus with the tutorial posts so far have been on the store owner. What about the customer though? If you’re someone a little bit confused about how to buy something from a store, or, you could even be a store owner who is looking out for the wellbeing of their customers, either way, this video is for you.

It’s a pretty short video this time around at 2 and a half minutes but it will guide you through the process of adding something to your cart and then checking out fully.

Psst…this video is also great for storeowners to gain some insight into what their customers see and when during the checkout process – consider that!

Your store isn’t going to be much good without your products right? In today’s tutorial video we’ll be sharing with you how to add products to your store, activate those products so that people will actually see them and then edit products already in your store.

Questions? Add a comment below and we’ll see what we can do to help

The tutorial videos are back to save the day! Up until now we’ve given you videos on how to register on Snaply and how to register on PayFast. Hopefully you found them useful but some of you might have been left thinking, “Okay great, I have my store…now what?” That’s where today’s video comes in.

Our tutorial today will be guiding you through the process of filling in your information on the Store settings page and getting your store completely ready to do business. Now it is a bit of a long video at 6 minutes in length, but we will be covering all the basics of the store settings page so every second counts.

Look at your car. What colour is it? How important was the colour in your choice to buy the car? For many people colour can be a deciding factor due to the emotional effect that colour can have on us as human beings. If you do a quick search online for colour psychology, you’ll find oodles of links ready to explain to you just what red, purple and blue are doing to your mental state every day.

So what does that have to do with the design of your store?

Well it’s not just your emotions that colour can effect, but your spending habits as well. I found this great infographic this week over at Kissmetrics which shows how colours can affect purchases. They offer up a lot of fascinating, if not useful, information.

Don’t believe me? Consider this. According to their research, colour was a deciding factor in whether they made a purchase for 85% of customers in a certain demographic (I’ll get to this in a bit). That’s a giant statistic and one you should consider when you’re designing your store.

So what influence does colour actually have? Let me give you a quick example before you look at the full graphic yourself.

First, there’s red. Red is considered a colour which inspires urgency and energy. It’s even said to increase the heartbeat. Where do we see it most in marketing and stores? When there’s a sale! What about purple? You see that a lot right? Well purple is consdered to create a sense of calmness and royalty, it’s because of this that it is often associated with beauty products.

That’s all good and well right but what did I mean earlier about a “certain demographic”? It turns out that demographic is made up of people who are in comfortable financial positions. If someone is in a large amount of debt and doesn’t have much disposable income, they aren’t going to be worrying much about colour and rather where they can get the item cheapest. Just a little extra something to keep in mind.

Here’s the full infographic. To see the larger version, click on the image.

Via Kissmetrics

The internet hasn’t been around for that long in this country. 15 Years for some, less than 10 for others. In this short span of time though, it has made a huge difference on how consumers behave and if you want your products to sell, you’re going to have to keep up with those consumers. Simple product videos can help you do that.

It’s quite simple really. When you walk into a store you can look at, touch or pick up a product to take a closer look. With E-commerce, you’re often given a simple picture and a list of the products features. It’s a cold approach and it’s taking it’s toll on your sales. Consumers seem to feel overloaded by all this information. Imagine you’re trying to sell a car and you go on to list every single one of the thousands of parts that make up that car, along with the information for that part. That’s right, it would be overwhelming for anyone looking at the information and they’ll probably skip on by. That is  an exaggeration but the idea remains the same.

So what can you do? Your customers want details but when you give it to them, it’s too much. That’s the difficult part. You have to find a small amount of the most relevant information.

Many E-commerce storeowners are now turning to online video to help them get all the info across without overwhelming their customer. These storeowners will give a basic description of the product along with the essential feature information – and then include a video or a link to a video which gives a hands on display of the product. These videos do have some guidelines though:

1. They should be kept short. You don’t want to bore your customer.

2. Only focus on the essential information.

3. Give a great demonstration of how it works.

Bonus: Everyone loves a laugh. Funny videos often work even better – but don’t force it if you’re a member of the lemon family.

Whether you believe global warming exists or not is no longer the question. If we keep going the way we are, we will have some effect (more so than we have already) on our beautiful planet – whether it be global warming or the extinction of another fluffy animal. Look around the next time you’re walking down a busy street. You’ll see cars spewing carbon monoxide, litter on the streets and fewer trees than when you were younger. In other words, it’s time we do anything we can to help protect this precious planet of ours. The best part is, you can do your part by taking your business online or even shopping online.

How exactly? There are a few ways that shopping online actually helps the environment.

1. Less vehicle travel.

When do you use your car most often? If you’re like the average person, you mostly use it to go to and from work and to do some kind of shopping – and you can get rid of both. If you take your business online you can take advantage of telecommuting. Depending how far you have to travel to and from work this could be a hefty amount of CO2 emissions. As for shopping, a resourceful retailer in Switzerland commissioned a study which calculated that each time a customer shops online rather than driving to the shops, 3.5 kilograms of CO2 emissions were saved. That’s pretty substantial.

2. Less paper waste.

Having your business online means that most of the time you can communicate with customers or potential customers completely via the web. Email newsletters can replace the old paper brochures and catalogues that companies used to send out, saving untold amounts of paper each year. Social media and online advertising can allow you to reach a massive audience without having to spend money on more traditional, costly and potentially environment damaging advertising methods.

Let’s not forget the possibilities of paperless billing as well. Imagine how much paper you could save in your business if you simply took your invoicing online?

3. Less packaging (If you do it right)

I know this sounds completely wrong but hear me out. What’d you eat for breakfast? Cereal perhaps? And what do you do with the box once it’s empty? Chances are you throw it out or recycle it through traditional means. How about you do neither and use that cereal box to ship small items from your online store?

This is what’s known as green shipping – recycling any and all possible shipping materials to ship items from your store or to package them safely. Cereal boxes, shoe boxes, egg cartons, plastic bags, newspapers – all of these items can be used as recycled shipping materials.

The best part is that besides saving the planet, you’ll also be saving money on materials which is a saving you can filter down to your customers.

So you see, going online and digital can help keep our earth green. Why not give it a shot?