While it may seem like a long ways away, it is never too early to begin planning for the upcoming Holiday 2011 shopping season.
Holiday season spending is making a grand rebound from the 2008 – 2009 recessions. Last year, comScore reported this past year’s e-commerce spending in the November – December 2010 holiday season reached $32.6 billion, a twelve-percent increase from the previous year. One of the leading factors of this phenomenal increase is the online shopping holiday Cyber Monday (similar to Black Friday). Cyber Monday this past year was the first billion-dollar online spending day in history, and was the top online spending day of the season.
With great anticipation, this upcoming holiday season should hold similar outcomes. Take the time to prepare your company for the high demands shoppers during the holidays hold (hint: free shipping deals are a big hit) so that that this year will roll by with ease.
Many Magento stores lack the sales they need for reasons that seem unknown to them, they need Magento Optimization. A list was pulled together by QuBit to help companies understand what their websites are lacking, and how to correct them.
Hunter Dixon had their fashion photoshoot for the Fall 2011 line for a ‘picture is as picture does’ representation for their collection’s sales sheet.
On Monday, August 1st, Hara Partners made the photo shoot possible with creative direction and shoot production, direction, and management. Hara Partners’ Vernon Fong and Michael Tai photographed the beautiful clothes in the West Chelsea Building’s art lofts.
Another successful shoot with the Hara Partners team! Keep up the good work!
Any online store looks to obtain two things: functional simplicity and visual aesthetics. With these two features, any store can draw their customers in and guide them through the shopping experience with ease. There are times in which shortcuts are made, attempting to make these goals as easy as possible to obtain. Unfortunately shortcuts don’t always prove to be the best method.
Example A: Cafe Commerce; a “simple-to-use” e-store factory that takes very little time or effort to establish for $30 a month. A free 14 day trial is available, if one was curious about trying their hand at the program. However, the overall experience is nothing less than disappointing.
The general organization of the system is neat, but far too basic. It is easy to navigate through the background structure of your store, simple to add or remove items, and quick to check the statistics on your sales. Everything is properly labeled and explained on its function, but it limits the possibilities on how to design your online store.
The themes available for the store websites are generic, plain, extraordinarily basic. Nothing about these templates is exciting or grabbing, and would most likely lose a shopper’s intrigue quickly. And what’s worse, the availability to go above and beyond what Cafe Commerce has to offer is not entirely out of reach.
There is the possibility to preform personal coding (Design > Advanced) with a red warning that this part of the design is for “CSS Ninjas only!” Meaning: the potential to build your website using CSS coding is still very limited and basic while using Cafe Commerce.
Overall, Cafe Commerce only offers a small window of opportunity to create a fully-functioning and appealing online store. When online stores first began to make an appearance, these website designs would have been considered advanced and top-notch. Now, there is much more possibilities to make your store look interesting and navigational without the need for these simplistic templates.
Some things are just better left to the CSS Ninjas.
On the Thursday of July 7,2011 Hara Partnersand B.Moss joined together for the creation of a long but fun fashion photoshoot.
From creative direction, casting, shoot management and post-production retouching for final files, Hara Partners made everything possible for our wonderful friends at B.Moss.
With help from the talented Meagan Hester who was in charge of hair and make up ,the three wonderful models (Allison Burnett, Stephanie, and Lauren Berlingieri), and HARA Partners’ Vernon Fong the B.Moss Photoshoot was a success!
Chris Schreiber is director of marketing at social video advertising company Sharethrough. A leading expert on social content strategy, Chris recently presented a two-hour workshop on viral video at the Cannes Lions festival, entitled “Making Videos Go Viral: Creative, Social, and Technological Techniques.”
Last week, the world’s top brands and agencies descended on the Cannes Lions festival to discuss creativity in modern advertising and to anoint the campaigns that most effectively captured our imaginations. While the conference was renamed this year to the “International Festival of Creativity” (previously the “International Advertising Festival”), it featured an unprecedented amount of participation from blockbuster technology companies such as Google, Facebook and Microsoft.
Over the course of the week, the significant relationship between the powerful new forces in technology and the creative output from the advertising industry became quite clear. As the web increasingly empowers us to choose and share the media we care about, brands genuinely commit to creating content and experiences that thrive in our on-demand culture.
In this article there are five video’s which show different themes of majors changes of the world of advertising.
[ A New Wave of Experimental Marketing]
The first video was a nike commercial which showed different soccer player’s showing a future glimpse of what would happen if they make their goal. The visuals were compelling and action packed.
[Content, Not Ad’s]
Unlock the formula was Coca Cola’s video which showed multiple images and clips of coca cola and the secret behind their formula. What made it special was the usage of cultural content in it, showing different time periods but have a connection due to coca cola. The overall feel of this ad had a little creepy side to it.
[ The Shift from Communities to Collectives]
An ad for Sneakerpedia which is a wikipedia style site powered by Footlocker for “sneakerheads” to document the history of sneakers. It’s the buzz of this site that makes it sucessful.
[ The rise of the “Creative Technologist”]
Advertising is becoming digital and agencies are looking to bring in more developer talent to help create new and original products. Interactive media is becoming an essential to advertising these days.
Last but not least the [ The Gaga Effect]
The Gaga Brand has been taken globally where people all over the world can say that they would know who Lady Gaga is. By using digital tools she broadens her fan base all over the world.
Boagworldrecently published a Magento review on their blog. Boag writes while that “Magento is a powerful ecommerce system with a steep learning curve,” he stresses that developing an ecommerce solution needs to be about more than technology.
“When it comes to ecommerce I am platform agnostic. I care little about the underlying technology as long as it delivers an optimal user experience and tools that allow the store owner to run a streamlined and cost effective enterprise.”
Boag writes that whether the solution is self-built or not, all he really cares about is “the right tool for the job.”
“It’s not really great for the amateur PHP hobbyist either. The learning curve is steep, reflecting the power.”
Boag writes that there is no doubt that Magento is a serious ecommerce platform for store owners, featuring powerful reporting features, with the ability to handle complex discounting and vouchers and integration capabilities with other systems such as stock control and accounting. “In fact, based on our first experience of using the system it covers all of the bases any serious store owner would insist on.”
Boag also praises the Magento community, stating that “with so many contributors there is always somebody who has built a plugin or knows the answer to a specific problem. There are also books, blog posts and much more.”
In his comparison of the two versions of Magento’s software, Enterprise and Community, Boag lists the pros and cons of each.
“The enterprise version is not cheap but does come with improved functionality, better support and indemnity insurance.”
“The community version on the other hand has its active community and there is no guarantee the advice and plugins they provide will work with the enterprise version (although they normally do).”
Boag finishes his post with the thought that “it’s not [all] about the technology.”
“Magento is great, no doubt about it. However, it is important not get caught up in its features and functionality. As with choosing any piece of software you need to step back and ask what you need rather than what the software offers.”
Thankfully, there are companies like Hara that address users’ needs, with services like theNetSuite-Magento Connector. However, since Mr. Boag didn’t mention us in his post, we hope in the near future he might give us a shout-out for our good work.
We set out to hiring Magento developers by attending:
The Silicon Alley Talent Fair took place at the 69th Regiment Armory on a warm NYC day of June 15th.
Hara Partners was joined by over 150 other companies to scout and pull talent that showed up at the fair.
And the turn out was not a disappointment with over 60 great interviewees in this ‘speed dating’ scenario!
Vernon and Shanel represented Hara Partners at the Armory.
To keep Vernon and Shanel going for the crazy and fun full-day event, SATF offered food, drinks & beer, ping pong tournaments, and great music. Thank you SATF!
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