Blog | MaxGen Media

eCommerce stats and a hot new look

Court — Mon, 29 Mar 2010 05:19:50 +0000

Here it is boys and girls, we’re back and dancing on the grave of our old website. And we don’t know how to slow dance.

So what do you all think? Big improvement? Be sure to submit a comment if you have any suggestions, or we might let the assumed perfection go to our heads.

Anyway, instead of our usual blog drivel we thought we’d throw you good people a few real world facts and figures might be of use to eCommerce retailers out there.

Here’s a bit data that we’ve collected over the Christmas 2009 period (part one):
Source of all data: XSIS WebMaster Shopping Cart website transactions December 2009

Sales by Payment Method

New business owners often find the costs to get a Merchant Account set up with their bank to be prohibitive. And don’t get us wrong, they can be. With monthly costs for the bank, payment gateway and merchant service fees, it can be a big pill to swallow.

The truth however is that if you aren’t offering payment by credit card, you will be severely limiting potential customers. The graph below tells the story:

Source: XSIS WebMaster Shopping Cart website transactions December 2009

Moral: 87% of online purchases are paid for by Credit Card. You need a pay by Credit Card option for your customers.

Transaction size

No huge analysis to be gained by this, but the average online transaction size over Christmas was about $138 (excluding shipping costs).

That’s all for now, but be sure to keep an eye on this very blog for more eCommerce stats and the thrilling conclusion to this two-parter.

Email Newsletters – The how and why

Court — Thu, 18 Feb 2010 01:44:01 +0000

At MaxGen we often find that business owners are thinking about their website the wrong way. So I usually offer them this example:

Consider a regular retail store. A roadside trading house where people enter and empty their wallets. Now realise that your website is a digital version of that – but instead of bricks and mortar you have binary and megabytes. The same principles apply to both when attracting customers of any form, whether they’re virtual or in-shop.

To get those customers, you advertise. You promote promote yourself on TV, over the radio and through print. Through these expensive, old-world ways in the hope to get recognised. But how do you measure success? How do you know where your money went?

Explaining a website in this way generally makes people see their website in a slightly different light. And the next point of discussion is obvious – email marketing.

But setting up an email marketing system is the easy part. How should business owners go about preparing the newsletter itself?

This article at smashingmagazine.com provides some goods suggestions and examples. To summarise a couple of good points:

Tell users why they should sign up

“Subscribe Here” is rarely enough. People receive plenty of marketing material in their inboxes already – so why yours? Will they be getting regular discounts, will it enrol them into competitions or will they get news that actually helps their business? You need to quell your visitors’ fears that by subscribing they’re just growing your database. Remember: they are giving you their email address in the hope of getting something out of it as well.

Reward them for doing so

In the case of an online store, why not give them an automatic gift voucher to entice a purchase? If your email newsletter system supports it, add all new subscribers to a separate list and send them a deal straight off the bat. What’s the likelihood of them ever unsubscribing if they know from day 1 that it was worth their time to sign up?

Write enticing subject lines

When your customers are scrolling through their inbox at 9AM, you want them to click on the unread message from you first. A punchy, to the point subject will do that. Is it just a sale? Or is it a 20% off sale? Don’t be coy – let them know. People don’t have time to scroll though pages of text to get to the money. Which leads on to…

Content, Content, Content

Pretty much as above. Your subscribers will have expectations of what they will be getting in your email newsletters – and as the business owner its your job to exceed them. Whether with targeted promotions or expert advice, it comes down to the content to determine if your mailing lists grow or shrink.

Keep it simple

Make sure your email newsletters are tidy and readable. Get them professionally designed, and cater for your audience. If your marketing to an older crowd, don’t use a size 6 font. Follow our usability guide and ensure people can get the gist of your email just from skimming. Because that’s all they’ll be doing.

Mailbomb – Fast, Friendly and Affordable Email Newsletters

Court — Mon, 19 Oct 2009 04:52:41 +0000

So our launch prediction was more than a little off, but those extra 2 months meant we got everything perfect and ready for primetime.

So without further ado – hear ye, hear ye:

www.mailbomb.co.nz

Like all of our software, we’ve built Mailbomb from the ground up to be affordable, feature-rich and exceptionally easy to use.

Why?

Using a newsletter manager like Mailbomb is seriously a no-brainer. If you have a decent list of email subscribers (and want it to grow) you’ll be stunned at the response that a professional mailout gets – especially for such little investment.

Where?

Be sure to check out the website and drop us a line if you want to be part of the action – we’re more than happy to provide demonstrations. We already have a few dozen business owners that are sending out beautiful newsletters weekly and are absolutely stoked with the results. Stay tuned for case studies.

How Much?

Not much. $300 gets you up and running and after that its just a low per-email rate. Hit up the pricing page for more info.

Special Opening Special Special Deal!

We’re really happy with how Mailbomb turned out and look forward to nuturing another thoroughbred into the MaxGen stable.

I’m not entirely sure why I ended with a horse metaphor. I’m just so excited!

It Begins

Court — Thu, 09 Jul 2009 22:49:54 +0000

T-minus 60 days. http://www.mailbomb.co.nz/

*cue dramatic sound*

Email (contact) form class: make sending emails easier!

Daniel — Fri, 15 May 2009 05:18:16 +0000

As a PHP developer, I’m always having to create functions to send email forms to both customer and website administrator so that everyone can keep track of what’s going on. A basic example would be your standard web contact form.

Sometimes it can be a big job if I’m dealing with lots of fields, (we once had a project with over 100 fields – big form!!!) as each one needs to be built individually and maintained manually.

What I’ve done to speed up the process is written a small class which works with the most popular PHP email library – PHP Mailer. This small class will generate email form automatically according the $_POST information, and I’m gonna share it with you lucky web cats.

Step 1: Create your email template database

First we need create a table to store your email form, this table can be defined by yourself to suit the project you’re working on

Example:

CREATE tblEmail (
	code varchar(10)
        from_Email varchar(60),
	from_Name varchar(60),
	subject varchar(80),
	content Text,
        Primary key (Code)
}

In the content field, you can store your email template with tag you’ve defined. In my example, the tag will be formatted like this: [tagname].

<h1>My Contact Formh1>
<table>
   <tr>
      <td>Nametd>
      <td>[name]td>
   tr>
   <tr>
      <td>Phonetd>
      <td>[phone]td>
   tr>	
   <tr>
      <td>Emailtd>
      <td>[email]td>
   tr>	
table>

Step 2: Update the HTML form on your website

You don’t need change your form too much, simply update the name of each field and make sure it comes with the same name of your tag. This class works with text, select, checkbox, option and textarea.

Sample form:


Enter your name: 
Enter your phone number: 
Enter your email:

Step 3: Use the class to send email

Remember to download PHPMailer and include it in your script with the email form class.

The rest is simple:

Include (“phpmailer.php”)
Include (“emailform.class.php”)
 
Form=new EmailForm(“code”);  ← The key to loading up the correct email template from database
Form.generate_email($_POST);
Form.send(“MaxGen Media”,info@maxgen.co.nz”);

And that’s it!! You can use this class to generate big forms that get sent out to your customer and web admin.

You can also customise the constructor

You can modify this EmailForm class to load up an email template:

function __construct($id=0) { 
   $this->id = $id;
   // Place your query to load your email template here.
   $rs=mysql_query(“select * from table where code=’$id’);
   row=mysql_fetch_row($rs)) 
   // Fetch data and store email information
   $this->subject = $row['subject'];	
   $this->from_name = $row[‘from_name’];	
   $this->from_email = $row['from_email'];	
   $this->content = $row['content'];
}

Download the files

Enjoy. If you need a hand be sure to leave a comment.

The New

Court — Wed, 08 Apr 2009 00:03:11 +0000

What’s brewing at MaxGen? What isn’t.

On top of launching a slew of new XSIS WebMaster-powered websites, stick around for all this goodness:

New Twitter feed for xsis. This replaces the old panel and will consist of the same updates, downtime and maintenance notices. Exciting stuff for people who like their news dull, dorky and under 140 characters. Follow us @xsis.
Semi-secret project, watch this space.
The delightfully named Mailbomb, which is a long overdue overhaul to our email marketing system. It’s looking good and should be ready for takers in about a month. Take a peek here – (preview pic).
iPhone Apps. All the ‘cool’ web-types are into this thing in a big way so we’ve gone ahead and registered as an official developer. Stefan and Daniel are heading this up for us, so be ready for MaxGen’s app offering when the version 3.0 iPhones are released sometime in June.
A new design for this very website. Almost 2 years we’ve been rocking this look now, and while it’s still passable, it is definitely time we knock it up a notch. We’ve been passing concepts round for a couple of weeks now and are finally on the right track.

Merry Christmas

Court — Wed, 17 Dec 2008 00:07:37 +0000

Just a heads up about our Christmas hours:

We’ll be out of the office from the 23rd of December and back again from the 5th of January. During that time we’ll still be responding to all urgent support calls and emails.

Have a great Christmas and New Years everyone, catch you all next year.

Flash Stretch (AS3 Class)

Alysson — Wed, 03 Dec 2008 02:07:37 +0000

Hey all, my name is Alysson. I’m the lead Flash developer at MaxGen, and would like to share an AS3 class that I’ve made to stretch things in Flash.

During the planning stages of developing a website, we often consider the option to build it fully in Flash. If we decide that Flash is the best way forward, a consideration that always arises is whether we should design the site with a fixed width or if it should scale to 100% of the browser window.

As web designers/developers are aware, this is very much a question of aesthetics. In our case, we needed a small and fast AS3 class to help us stretch certain content like the navigation menu and background image. In fact the class we created can dynamically enlarge any content without distortion as the user increases the browser window size.

We’ve found it pretty useful for our projects, and hopefully you will too.

How to use:

Click here to see a live demo. (resize it)

Step 1: Download these files (download here).

Step 2: Create a new Flash AS3 document and create a MovieClip and instance it as “myMc”. Once that’s done, open the Actionscript console and type the following:

import maxgen.utils.Stretch;
 
stage.align = StageAlign.TOP_LEFT;
stage.quality = StageQuality.HIGH;
stage.scaleMode = StageScaleMode.NO_SCALE;
 
var s:Stretch = new Stretch();
 
stage.addEventListener(Event.RESIZE, onResize);
 
function onResize(e:Event):void
{
   s.baseWidth(myMc, stage.stageWidth);
 
   if(s.target.height < stage.stageHeight)
   {
      s.baseHeight(s.target, stage.stageHeight);
   }
}

And that’s it. To explain:

The files that you have downloaded must be in the same directory as your .fla file.

The code inside the “onResize” function is the most important: “s.baseWidth(myMc, stage.stageWidth);” This says that “myMc” will be of the same width as the browser window when resized.

If the content to be resized is smaller than the height of the browser window, this code will correct it:

if(s.target.height < stage.stageHeight)
{
   s.baseHeight(s.target, stage.stageHeight);
}

Enjoy. and be sure to leave a comment if you’ve found this class helpful for your own projects.

Fun with buzzwords (buzzcronyms?)

Court — Thu, 13 Nov 2008 05:20:48 +0000

A delightful little acronym that I’ve noticed popping up more and more is this one: SaaS (apparently the last ‘s’ is capitalised but the a’s are not).

The ever-useful www.acronymfinder.com was kind enough to fill me in

Unsure and unconvinced I hit up Wikipedia.

There’s a lot of words on that page. Nice guy that I am I persevered so you don’t have to – long story short, it means Web application.

What followed was an interesting conversation with myself. Take a look at the related articles in both the Wiki pages for SaaS and Web application. What do you find? An outrageous number of buzzwords. And yet industry types wonder why non-web folk can switch off during a slang-laden speech. In part I think it’s because developers feel the need to apply an overly complex label to every facet of our business (the social retardation doesn’t help either I guess).

Case in point: Web 2.0. Personally I think it serves as little more than a phrase that budding valley boys can use when pitching to VC’s (money men). Web 2.0 represents the online business model without a business model, not a distinct technological evolution that certain pundits claim it to be. And now we have SaaS, and the NZ Herald dumbing down the Wiki page in a Telecom advertorial. Because if there’s any company that needs more money from public fear, uncertainty and doubt; its clearly Telecom.

We’re only human here at MaxGen. I’m sure on occasion our clients completely ignore our jargon – and fair enough too. We do however try our best to keep it simple and in plain English. Something that we feel isn’t too difficult to accomplish when you have a decent grasp of customer needs and wants.

We’ve been busy little bees

Court — Thu, 14 Aug 2008 01:48:22 +0000

Long time no see, with good reason though.

Catch up time:
Last month, both Dan and myself were fortunate enough to be invited to speak to a couple of very different groups of people.

First was a conference held by Tristan Nickless of Word by Mouth and the collective crew of Speech Pathology Australia and the New Zealand Speech-language Therapists’ Association. It was great to speak to a bunch of interested owners of private speech therapy practices about the pros (no cons here) of getting a Website.

A week or so later, we met up with the emerging talent out of Botany Downs Secondary College. First off, what a sweet complex. The school has only been around a few years and has already been labelled as the ‘learning institution of the future’, surely thanks in part to the progressive teachings of Mr. Enda McKenna (head of IT). During the hour or so we spoke we covered a few topics including working with clients, design principles, SEO and general traps for young players.

Couple of pics below:

Big thanks to both groups, was our pleasure to bore you all to tears.

Stay tuned this week and next for some updates to the blog as we:

- Unveil the big projcet that’s been keeping us from posting regularly
- Introduce a new weekly feature
- Spew miscellaneous trite