A wise man once said “it is better to give than to receive.“  Clearly that man never received an Xbox, but it’s still a nice thought, so we’re gonna go with it.

In honor of this season of giving, we’ve decided to give you the greatest gift of all: we’re going to enable your obsessive need to keep a constant eye on your Volusion store’s revenue by giving you Volusion Snapshot!

Volusion Snapshot (currently available in the iTunes app store) is a completely free and easy way to watch your sales add up during the holidays and throughout the year.  We created Volusion Snapshot to be secure and simple and to provide you with the one piece of data we know you’re looking for: revenue.  Volusion Snapshot provides current (refreshable) daily revenue figures as well as monthly data, annual data and year-over-year comparisons.  Now you can watch your bottom line while you’re on the go without having to constantly log in to your Volusion dashboard.  We’re giving you the gift of freedom.

… AND if you happen to have multiple Volusion stores, we have even more good news.  Volusion Snapshot will allow you to stay logged in to each of them simultaneously so you can see your online empire expanding no matter where you are.

Brand Labs is dedicated to ecommerce and we’re always working to make it better.  Volusion Snapshot is our gift to the entire Volusion community with the hope that it makes your lives a little easier.  It comes with our very best wishes for a joyous, peaceful and prosperous 2012!

Happy Holidays!

Restyling the product page is one of the most common custom Volusion programming requests we receive.  We understand completely.  When you’re building your brand identity you don’t want the effort to stop at the product page.  That’s why we’re so excited about the custom Volusion product page we just completed for Willow Street Boutique.

Willow Street is a fashion apparel site and since they’re all about creating that special look, they asked us to help them by creating a way to show that complete look on their product pages.  They wanted to have the ability to prominently feature items related to the one on the current product page so that the customer could make a whole outfit without backtracking.  So if you’re looking at a skirt, you could see the top & shoes that would complete the look.  It’s a fantastic way to increase add-on sales… if only there were some way to make it happen… wait.  There is.  Hire us.

Check out the custom solution we created after the jump…

(more…)

Beer makes everything better – bowling, Oktoberfest, dinner with the in-laws, ecommerce… everything.

love2brew is dedicated to beer – like massively dedicated.  They can sell you beer brewing equipment, beer ingredients, beer books… pretty much everything except for actual beer beer.

In addition to providing everything you need to make your own personal brew, the site can teach you how to make it happen via love2learn – the love2brew knowledge base.

So, if you’re interested in beer for reasons other than just drinkin’ it, love2brew was built for you.

Side note: look at that glass over there!  Look at it!  It just makes us want to lick the screen!

Our good friends over at Volusion are about to make some lucky emerchant’s dream come true!

One person will walk away with a free Volusion store – for life!  (The value of the prize depends entirely on how long you plan to live, so you should plan to live a really long time – that’ll show ‘em!)

There are other prizes, too, but how much do you need to know?  You’re an emerchant.  You like free stuff.  Go enter right now!

Here’s yet another entry in our ongoing parade of custom Volusion Templates – Salty Supply!

We must admit that when we first heard the name of this site, we imagined some sort of online potato chip superstore, but that misconception was entirely attributable to our personal massive ignorance and our deep love of salty snacks.  Anyhoo, Salty Supply is all about being the absolute best online supplier for all of your aquarium-related needs and not so much about Pringles.

… which is too bad, because when you think about it, salt water fish are probably among a very small number of creatures on Earth who can eat Pringles without worrying about how the salt content will affect their blood pressure.

… just sayin’.

As a part of our continuing effort to make the custom Volusion development process more transparent (and therefore, less intimidating) we offer this Custom Volusion Programming RFQ Workflow.

In case you’re unfamiliar with the acronym, RFQ stands for “Request for Quote”.  It’s the process that you’ll go through when you come to us with a custom programming need for your Volusion store.  Of course, every need is as unique as the website it’s attached to, so there will be differences between what you experience and what you see here, but if you’ve never gone through the custom programming quoting process, this will give you a general idea of what to expect.

The most important part of this entire process is in the big fat circle in the upper left corner of the chart.  That’s the conversation (or series of conversations) that you’ll have with your account manager before the project moves an inch.  We know a lot about ecommerce and we want to know a lot about your business before we start any custom Volusion development project.  We want that info so that we can look at every possible solution available to you.  You may well have an idea of what you’d like to do, but it’s more important for us to know what you’d like to achieve.  If we know and understand your end goal(s) we can explore solutions that may not have occurred to you.  We want to solve your problem in the best possible way, even if we have to build the solution from scratch.

So, if you’re considering taking on a custom Volusion project, we’d like to help… and now you know how we plan to do it.  Of course this chart can’t answer all of your questions, but we can.

We’ve said it before and we’ll say it again: the online market is a very competitive place.  It’s not a brilliant or deeply insightful observation, but it’s a critical one and you don’t want to ignore it.  If you know that it’s a battlefield out there, then you owe it to yourself to exploit every available advantage.  Which brings us (as it so often does) to the topic of branding.

We build Volusion templates that build your brand.  There’s a handy example right here – WhoAreYaDesigns.com.  This nostalgic and beautiful template design speaks volumes about Who Are Ya and their self-proclaimed dedication to soccer fans who are “in the know”.  This is a brand that’s about the history of soccer (football, for those in the know) – the feeling of it.  This is a brand that inspires dedication.  This is a brand that sells.

So while you’re marketing and tweaking your SEO, don’t forget to give a little love to the first thing your customers see: your brand.

We’ve all seen those websites that take a… well… let’s call it a really straightforward approach to SEO.  You know what we’re talking about – a mile-long homepage, filled to the brim with keyword-stuffed copy and hundreds of links.  Of course there’s no definitive proof that this sort of scattershot approach is actually effective, but it kind of makes sense at an intuitive level and even if you don’t want to engage in that sort of sloppy SEO, you still have to worry about your competition, who have no such reservations.  There are a lot of verticals that use that sort of homepage design as their industry standard, including auto parts.  Which brings us to CVF racing…

We just completed and launched CVF Racing’s new custom Volusion template and if you take a moment to check it out, you’ll see how we addressed the problem of keyword-stuffing competitors.

In our rather elegant solution you’ll see that we’ve retained the necessary SEO copy, including client testimonials, but in a relevant, well-structured way that reacts to the widely-held belief that the quality of the copy is at least as important as the quantity of the keywords.  You’ll also see several banks of navigation links that relate directly to the important keywords for the site.  They make their presence known to Google and all the other search engines, but not at the expense of the user experience.  They’re effective and pretty – like Wonder Woman.

Anyhoo, our point is that there’s very little point in paying for a custom Volusion template if it isn’t actually customized.  Your ecommerce site should meet the needs of your specific business and we can see to it that it does.

Our clients have a wide range of needs.  Of course we serve a lot of straight-up, retail, direct-to-consumer emerchants, but we also work with online businesses that sell digital products, gather sales leads or schedule services.  These sorts of specialized business models call for some specialized website functionality.  Take, for example, Shore Excursions Group…

Shore Excursions Group is one of our oldest clients and their site is like a mini custom Volusion development portfolio for us.  We’ve added all sorts of specialized software to allow SEG to become the market leader in the wide world of cruise ship side trips.  The latest addition is an automated expedite fee generator.

The software is brilliant in its simplicity.  It detects any instance of late excursion booking (within three days of the event) and it adds an expedite fee to the customer’s total.  If the customer tries to remove the fee, the software adds it back in.  It’s just this sort of big-picture, end-to-end transaction simplicity that builds credibility while it builds your bottom line.

We’ve been designing and developing custom Volusion templates for a lot of years now and it’s fair to say that we’ve got the process down to a science.  Need convincing?  Let’s go to the chart… (click to enlarge)

What you see here is the Brand Labs Custom Volusion Development Timeline.  Of course every Volusion template is unique.  That means that the custom development process varies from project to project, but there are certain things we can count on – predictable patterns.  That’s what this chart is all about.

If you look the chart over, you’ll see that it covers eleven weeks of consultation, design, more consultation, development and still more consultation.  If anyone tells you they can design your Volusion site from the ground up in under eleven weeks, we can tell you what they’re going to cut out: consultation.

Building a custom ecommerce site is a collaborative effort.  We pride ourselves on our efforts to learn about your business and its needs, but no one knows your business like you do.  Look at this chart – the orange areas are the periods in the process in which the client takes the lead.  In the eleven week process, you’ll see that the client takes the reins no less than seven times.

We want to work with you to transform your business in under three months – just fifty-five business days to build the online store of your dreams.  Call us to find out more about our custom Volusion template design process and how it can change your site from good to great.