Introduction to Adobe Business Catalyst

The Internet has completely transformed the way products are marketed and sold. Technology is evolving very quickly and businesses are constantly reinventing themselves. Customers want more for their money. They have learned to shop around to find the best value. They compare reviews to purchase the highest-rated items. As the expectations of potential buyers continue to increase, it is up to businesses to engage customers in new ways. It’s not enough for a business to simply have a searchable site. Static web experiences and stale product catalogs do not inspire online sales.

Note

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Successful e-commerce websites require a new level of sophistication. In addition to offering secure and simple payment transactions, they must be able to track site activity and collect visitors’ information, and to market products to potential customers. Business owners need the tools to easily access this critical data, use site analytics to optimize their inventory, add promotions to increase product sales, and target existing customers using strategic marketing campaigns to encourage repeat purchases.

It’s important to create a portal that facilitates two-way communication. Site features such as blogs, comments, and forums allow visitors to become involved with a business. The exchange of feedback and personalization generates a buzz of interest. Visitor interaction draws new customers to participate with a site, just as a lone person walking down the street is drawn to investigate the store with a crowd of shoppers inside.

As a web developer, your goal is to produce this online presence for business owners. And it makes sense to use a system that is scalable and flexible. It should be easy for you and your clients to update and maintain the site. A high-traffic site with constantly rotating inventory, timely sales promotions, and immersive features is critical to building a sustainable business model.

The site launch is no longer the moment of handoff when you move to the next project and your client’s site becomes frozen. A freshly published online business is the beginning of an ongoing partnership between you and your clients. They reap the rewards of your consultation services to help them review their site data and optimize their store, while you enjoy a predictable monthly revenue stream.

In this book, you’ll learn how to use the Adobe Business Catalyst Platform to build successful online businesses. You’ll find hands-on, step-by-step instructions that cover all the aspects of creating a modern and effective online sales mechanism. You’ll discover how easy it is to combine your unique designs and layouts with your client’s project requirements to deliver a custom website. You’ll also see how to improve a live site’s performance to increase online sales and exceed your client’s expectations.

Understanding Adobe Business Catalyst

The Adobe Business Catalyst Platform is a hosted CMS (Content Management System) that includes all the features needed to create online businesses—from displaying simple photo galleries to developing shopping carts. You can use your web-design skills to build complex websites quickly and efficiently. The pages use industry-standard HTML, CSS (Cascading Style Sheets), and JavaScript code. Programming experience is not necessary, and you don’t need to purchase additional software. All you need to get started is a browser with an Internet connection.

Tip

If you usually work with Adobe Dreamweaver to create websites, you can download and install the free Business Catalyst extension for Dreamweaver to perform many of the same development tasks from within the Dreamweaver workspace. Additionally, you can create Business Catalyst templates (DWT files) using Dreamweaver.

The prebuilt features, known as modules, make it easy to set up site functionality. Using an online interface, you add features to a page, exactly where you want them to appear in the design. You enable and configure the settings to control how the modules appear and behave. The module toolset facilitates your development process while making the system extremely flexible. It enables you to focus on designing the site and how it will look, rather than setting up the back-end database or programming how the site works.

This solution is a fully integrated, all-in-one CMS. If you’ve investigated using other CMSs, you know that the setup process usually involves installing and maintaining many different systems. Attempts to make a variety of systems work together and share data can be frustrating. This is where the Adobe Business Catalyst Platform shines. Because it is a unified system, the pieces are integrated and you don’t have to worry about conflicts or performance issues. All of the interactive features, including web-form submissions, customer contact data, order information, and site traffic reports are stored in a central database.

Examining Strategies for Online Businesses

Before building an online business, it is helpful to search online and compare various online stores to see how they are set up. When you first visit a site, notice your initial impression of the presentation and its design. Pay attention to the overall performance and how long the pages take to load. Explore the site to see if the navigation is intuitive. Look for error messages and broken links. Try searching for a product within a store catalog. Put some items in the cart to experience the checkout process. Click the Back button and see what happens. It is important to analyze these details to learn why some online store projects fail.

Customers are drawn to websites with clean designs and clear instructions. A common mistake is to put too much content on the home page. Visitors may never get past the first page if they cannot tell what the site sells or how to proceed. When working with your clients, establish two or three primary actions that the visitor should perform on each page, and then rank them by priority:

Limit the goals for each page to three or less. Design the page to ensure that the top-priority actions are the most visually prominent items.

Customers look for secure pages before entering their credit card information. If the page doesn’t use an HTTPS URL prefix, they may decide not to enter their credit card information in the form fields. If the site presents errors or issues with the Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) certificate, many people will leave the site immediately.

The Business Catalyst interface includes the ability to create secure pages. It is not necessary to purchase or renew an SSL certificate because an HTTPS version of the site is included automatically with the site hosting. Since the pages of a shopping cart are secure and customers never leave the site during the transaction process, they feel more confident about entering their payment information.

Building successful online businesses

The process of running an online business is a lot like running a brick-and-mortar store; many of the methods for increasing revenue are applicable. As you consult with your clients, get them to share their knowledge of sales techniques. They can provide valuable insight into reaching their target audience. Refine the proven strategies for improving sales in their retail store and apply them to get similar results in their online business.

For example, when a business needs to move a large quantity of inventory, they create a prominent display near the front door with an inviting sales price. Window shoppers see the discount and it entices them to purchase the item. Some sales include bulk discounts, such as buy two items and get the third item free. In a best-case scenario, the shopper may decide to purchase additional items before checking out.

You can take these suggestions and use them to update the site. Create a featured item graphic and place it prominently on the home page. Put the featured product in the virtual “storefront” so that potential customers are aware of the sale. Add promotional discount messaging in the product page and in the shopping cart pages that reminds customers of the opportunity to buy two items and get the third item free.

Print advertising is expensive. The Adobe Business Catalyst Platform includes many integrated features to promote online businesses without incurring costly printer and shipping expenses. For example, you can place a newsletter signup form on the site to collect the e-mail addresses of potential customers. Their contact data is stored in the database, along with any purchases, web-form inquiries, or other interactions they perform on the site. You can use the integrated e-mail campaign service to target specific customers and distribute sales promotions. You can also create loyalty programs to encourage repeat sales and let customers know that you appreciate their business.

Think about the websites that you investigated. When you added an item to the cart but then left the site, did you ever hear from the business again? Wouldn’t it be more effective if you received an e-mail message from the business a week later that mentions the item you put in the cart (but did not purchase) is now on sale? Think of the sales opportunities that present themselves when the site data is automatically collected and easily accessed—facilitating the distribution of promotions.

Key areas to focus on when analyzing an online business model

When you meet with a potential client about building their site, determine whether their business would benefit from the features included in the Adobe Business Catalyst Platform. Although this seems obvious, it is important; not every business model is a good fit.

Companies that sell products or services will get the most out of the solution. The system is specifically geared toward setting up an online catalog and facilitating payment transactions. The products could be physical objects that require shipping or digital files that are downloaded from the site after purchase. The system includes everything you need to set up tax codes and shipping options.

Web forms can be configured to contact business owners or sales teams via e-mail or text message. This is an excellent approach to use if the business offers services that require immediate attention. Short Message Service (SMS) message notifications ensure that the team on call can respond to website service requests in a timely manner.

The back-end interface (accessed only by your development team and the business owners themselves) includes the ability to manage support requests and respond to customer cases. Each support case is assigned its own unique case number. E-mail communications sent between the business and customers are tracked and time stamped to ensure that every issue is resolved and no one slips through the cracks.

Note

You can assign cases to different roles (sets of users) to ensure that each support request is assigned to the best person to respond to the customer’s inquiry.

The combination of customer management data reporting and online support features enables the business to provide customer service using minimal team resources.

Your clients can also access the back-end interface to make content changes to the site without using HTML or CSS code. The browser-based tool is intuitive to use, and they can type right into the fields that you set as editable. You can also enable the Announcements feature so that clients can add recent company news. This approach eliminates the bottleneck situations that can occur when the web designer is the only person who can perform updates. While not every client has the time or inclination to manage their own site content, this feature is very empowering for some businesses that want a greater sense of control and need to update their sites frequently.

Secure zones enable registered visitors to enter their credentials and access password-protected areas of the site. They can be used to share exclusive information with members, such as premium content and downloadable files. Private forums or client deliverables can be distributed through secure, non-searchable sections of the site. You can configure secure zones to be free or require payment for access as an additional way to generate revenue. You can also create secure zones to share confidential information with customers by displaying their account information and order history.

When you configure an online store, you have complete control over the payment gateways used to process transactions. The options are extremely flexible, because you can configure the currency to accept international payments. And you can set up payment gateways that support recurring payments to sell subscriptions, such as Authorize.Net, eWay, PayPal, and Sage Pay.

However, there are businesses that may not need these features. A static brochure site that is designed to simply make it easier for customers to find contact information and a store location may not utilize the tools.

Additionally, this solution is best suited for small to medium-sized businesses. Although it offers many time-saving features, such as the ability to batch import inventory to update product catalogs, it was not designed to accommodate an online store that sells tens of thousands of items.

When you evaluate potential clients, consider the key benefits that the Adobe Business Catalyst Platform offers:

• All-in-one hosted solution

• Flexible design layouts that utilize templates to streamline production time

• Customizable online store product catalogs and shopping carts

• Interactive site features, including web forms, blogs, and forums

• A central back-end database that stores all the site’s data

• Integrated e-mail marketing campaign creation, distribution, and tracking

• Robust reporting features that enable data access on a granular level

Using This Book

If you are a designer who has previously only created static websites or a developer who has created dynamic websites and is looking for a new system, this book is geared toward you.

You’ll learn how to integrate the features in the Adobe Business Catalyst Platform to build an interactive online business. You’ll get an in-depth understanding of what’s possible so that you can confidently consult with your clients. This book assumes that you already run a successful web design and development business.

Although the projects you build with Business Catalyst are dynamic websites, you do not need prior experience programming with server-side scripting languages. You should have an understanding of web-design concepts, as well as some prior knowledge of working with HTML, CSS, and JavaScript code.

The Adobe Business Catalyst Platform offers free trial sites. The instructions provided in this book describe how to build a sample site using one of the templates included with Business Catalyst and your own asset files.

How to contact the authors

Please send all inquiries and comments to:
Tommi West: info@tommiland.com
John Ulliman: info@onthewave.com

Mailing Address:
On The Wave
3136 Maxwell Ave
Oakland, CA 94619

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