Category: Business

  • Web Presence Assistance From Innovation Prince Edward Island

    Web Presence Assistance provides a non-repayable contribution to Prince Edward Island businesses to assist them in establishing a presence on the Internet. The purpose of this assistance is to help Island companies increase business by creating a website to establish online visibility and reach. Consumers today use Internet search engines to locate companies the way previous consumer groups used the Yellow Pages. If a company isn’t visible on the Web, it’s losing an opportunity to connect with potential customers.

    A website allows customers to easily find information they want – when they want it – and allows a company to expand its potential customer base beyond those in its immediate geographic area to a global customer base. Web321’s team can do a lot to make the most of your web presence.

    The grant contribution is limited to 40% of the cost to a maximum contribution of $500.00 per small business. Web321 has a special offer: 6 months of our Web Design Subscription for a discounted price of $1800. Apply the Innovation Prince Edward Island Web Presence grant and your venture could be eligible for a $500 grant to offset those already low fees.

    ELIGIBILITY & APPLICATION

    Eligible applicants include businesses and industry associations operating in PEI who presently do not have a web presence and plan to undertake activities that will lead to an effective presence on the web. A completed application form along with a written quote from a web developer outlining services to be provided should be submitted to the address below. Projects receiving other non-repayable contributions or grants from any source are not eligible.

    ELIGIBLE ACTIVITIES

    The types of services that may qualify include the registration of a domain name and the design, development, hosting, and search engine and mobile optimization of a website. Applicants should discuss their requirements with an Innovation Prince Edward Island representative to determine if their activity could be considered for this assistance. Application must be submitted before any financial or legal commitment is made on the project. Once approved, the grant money can be applied to a Web Design Subscription through Web321.

    Need Help?

    We can help with the grant application process. Contact us

  • When The Phone Book Company Has Your Website

    When The Phone Book Company Has Your Website

    phob30 years ago, businesses paid a good deal of money to have every listing in the phone book available. But when the internet began to become fashionable, the phone books tried to be present in the same way. They dedicated themselves to offering certain services with an added value related to the synergy of marketing. You can let the phone book handle everything that has to do with marketing. But a bump, even a small one within the roots of black in the yellow pages, costs businesses a few pennies. So the web pages of those phone books are going to cost as much money as they do well. You can compare the high cost that is needed to form all this, with the low functionality. But, it shouldn’t be like that. It is very easy to offer complete and sophisticated functionality on a website.

    You can take the phone book as a model, you can pay year after year for those goods. And instead of having a phone book, we will have a web page with all the available contacts. It is important that you can run that web page so that it is informative and that it connects in the best possible way with the audience.

    That is, to have a commercial exhibition within a community that has a global reach. So the most flexible solution is to start that website, you can do it through WordPress. Here we have a large number of very useful add-ons. With them, a very important web developer to apply these supplements to the web page and to be able to do everything we need.

    But, how can those web pages get worse to have the phone book electronically? Customers often invest in marketing, because closing the book can be very tricky within the phone book. It doesn’t have to be difficult to switch between different marketers.

    So a good web developer will register the domain name within the client’s name. This client will be the owner of the domain and that website, so the developer will offer good advice, will be in charge of doing all the technical work and will make sure everything works correctly.

    These companies are going to register a domicile with the client’s name but they have control of the domain.

    If the client and the same company separate, the one who will keep the domain is the company itself. If the phone book does this to the customer, it will reinforce your presence on the website. The good news is that customers have a good way to pause.

    How To Do It: Everything Step By Step

    Hire a web developer

    It is important that you find a good web developer and that you get along in the best possible way. You can talk to them about all your goals online. Then you will have to listen, everything we can achieve with your online business. You must calculate the budget there is in terms of both time and money.

    Try to rescue your domain name

    You must ask for your name within the domain. You have to take into account the costs that are involved in the whole process. If the domain name is valuable, you can keep it and even connect it with another client. If the domain is associated with any company name, it cannot be retained by the company. We may install them to transfer the domain, but if it fails, there is a specific body that is in charge of the supervision to be able to request it. They will be in charge of negotiating the transfer with a mechanism for resolving all disputes.

    It is not the best option, because the cost we have is considerable, this will allow you to maintain the domain when the brand is very similar.

    If this does not work, you can make a similar domain registration as it will coincide with that brand. It is not a good solution, but it is much faster than making a dispute. A website that is well established to market with the best of phone book companies and that is trying to impose itself.

    Get the content from your old phone book company website

    Any company that has good web development is going to return the best possible content to your business. When we are going to work with the developer himself, like this, we must ask about the plan in two different possibilities, they are these:

    1. When both are going to separate.
    2. When the business itself should close.

    Both of these issues shouldn’t be difficult to fix.

    Those designers are going to work with the specific client and they are going to launch the best project.

    Until your business website needs some kind of editing, the next interaction should be planned. This inertia can be continuous. Perhaps another reason to separate maybe this. The commercial relationships that we need will begin, life and sometimes close. We have a section to talk about everything that happens when a specific client wants to move on. Each of the designers or agencies have to have a good plan to know how to get a good start. If this business wants to get out of a relationship, it has to have a plan for how the agency is going to be able to provide good material. This content can be stored on the Dropbox platform with the client or with the designer himself. It is the best option for these media to be either delivered or lost. While the IBM company has had a lot of automation time under its belt, when you hire another company, they may lack that time of experience, structure, and good planning. It has worked for a total of 12 companies related to web design since it began to work in this field in the ’90s. Many of them have already died. If you go under, we will group all the assets and it will be provided to you. You have to keep in mind that if the accounts are up to date, there are no problems to provide all that information. These assets must be ready for delivery at any time. A computer can be very powerful, but it can be vulnerable to a soda can if it falls. So the resolution to this disaster is undoubtedly redundancy, that is, you must have all kinds of backups stored in the cloud or on archived hard drives.

    Of course, those assets do not come with an instruction guide. You can wait to work with a new design so that they can evaluate you and know what to work with.

    When considering the backup or transfer plan, you can ask them to write everything down in the contract. This is because if you don’t do it in writing, they won’t run it when necessary.

    Being able to plan situations before each event is fine, but what if this doesn’t happen? You don’t have to worry. We have a secret weapon for content recovery. It’s an internet file. You can enter there multiple times to have all kinds of customer content on hand and bring it to the present moment. So if the developer you were working with does not give up the website or the specific content, they can help with all this.

    When The Burn Stops, The Healing Begin

    There is a very important divide between what a good print designer does with the website itself and what can be done for that website. The website can be seen in a good way in the phone book, the key to eas deficiencies are going to affect that visibility. Some of those examples will be shown later. If the website falls too short on these elements, the work that is done to popularize and market that visibility is more difficult to achieve.

    Google is one of the most important search engines. But it is now when they have begun to penalize all the websites that are not protected. So if you are going to visit any page that is based on the phone book, you must take into account the lock that is there along with the web address. If it has a crossed-out red line through the lock, this will mean that it is not secure. It will be warned that these users do not disclose information through their contact forms. Google will take the measure of leaving it as far behind as possible in favour of others that are safe.

    Your website must be very easy for the Google platform to assimilate. We have different ways of disguising the content, this is called Open Graph. It’s not complicated and if you don’t have all of this, Google, Facebook, Yahoo or Bing, … they have less to work with.

    You have to keep everything that has to do with the code as up to date as possible. You MUST list the currency of use that you have in your country to be able to work with it. Each of the search engines will take as elements the keywords, this will indicate whether or not this website is late to use that element.

    The Easy Way To Do it

    Hand off the above tasks and concerns to a professional firm. Let them handle the domain transfer, the design, the management, the upkeep. If you need help getting your website freed up from the phone book company, let us help. We can do this and do it under one of our management plans to take the stress and concern out of the mix. Get started!

  • Make The Shift To Digital Now – 2021 Is Your Time To Shine

    Make The Shift To Digital Now – 2021 Is Your Time To Shine

    There is no doubt that the Covid-19 pandemic has literally torn the world apart. While the impact of the pandemic on the health and general well-being of millions of people in the country and millions across world has been quite traumatic, it also has come with a huge economic cost attached to it. Factories, manufacturing units and other commercial and business activities have come to a grinding halt almost across the world. Thousands of people across the board have lost their jobs and livelihoods and many of them have been pushed into extreme poverty and penury.

    However, it also is true that the 1st Phase COVID has more or less come to an end. We are seeing kids getting back to school and Labour Day is being talked about across many parts of the country. We are very much on the way to Phase II post-corona. But it is not without challenges and problems, as we have to keep safeguards in place. This is easier said than done and there is quite a bit of fatigue and stress attached to it.

    Things will start moving upwards as we start our efforts to get back to normalcy. But the fear of the disease and infection still persists and therefore it is quite obvious for businesses to try and move online. The main objective is to ensure that the businesses stay afloat and to make this possible moving online is becoming a need rather than a choice. Towards this objective there is no doubt that shifting to a digital mode could help in many ways and may help businesses to dominate their niche.

    We Need To Be Aware of the New Reality

    Last year, during this period the crowd was there in most of the brick and mortar outlets during the Labour Day and other such special days. Retailers had the required staff for handling walk-ins. However, Corona has forced us to look for some new norms and new ways of lives. The normal working hours are no longer applicable and the hours have to be curtailed. Customers are still afraid of coming out into public spaces. There is no doubt that the economic downturn caused by Covid has led to huge and unprecedented layoffs. The customers need to be aware of the new reality and the need to stay put at home and practice social distancing and other such new norms. Hence there is no alternative for businesses other than moving to a digital platform to survive.

    How Can This Happen

    While moving digital is no longer a choice but a necessity, making it happen is easier said than done. Most of us come across about the need to shift to a digital world, but in most cases it remains just a talk. Yes moving to a digital platform is a wonderful idea but someone has to bell the cat and things should happen on the ground. Covid-19 has given many business enterprises the right opportunity to move online though they may have been talking about it over the past many years. There are some obvious advantages of moving online and these benefits did not prop up all of a sudden. They were in existence and Covid-19 may have only hastened the process of moving into a digitalized economy. Moving online is perhaps akin to making a phone call or sending a text. While the latter will work only when the receiver is answering the calls, text will work even when the message is scene later. Therefore when you move online as an entrepreneur, you will, as an entrepreneur, be able to cater to the needs of the customers as and when he or she needs it.

    Some More Benefits That It Offers

    Major changes to your businesses are the need of the hour and this cannot happen unless you find ways to make the customers buy. When you shift digital you will be able to be in touch with them regularly without being physically in touch with them. In other words, you will be following the norms of social distancing and make sure that the customers place their orders online in a secure and safe manner. The articles will be ready and instead of delivering them to the customer, you can inform him or her and they will come and pick it up at their time and convenience. More importantly, when you move digital, you serve the customers based on their schedule and needs rather than you setting the tone and tenor for them as a business entity.

    When you have an online presence, you allow your customer to look up products and services sitting in the comfort of their home or workplace and place orders as and when they need it rather waiting for your store to open up and them coming in placing the order. Further, the customers will also be able to get the email records for each transaction and this helps them to be sure that their money is being spent well and it is going to the right products and services.

    How Does It Benefit You as an Entrepreneur?

    By moving online you also stand to gain a lot. You will be available to the customers when they need you, your products and services the most. You also will be able to manage your inventory better because there could be a reasonable time lag between the placement of orders and execution of orders. Your order fulfillment process will also become quite efficient and will bring down wastage of time and avoid over-stocking and understocking.

    You also will be able to follow-up on your customers better and your retention rates will also go up quite significantly. You can make use of their email and other forms of communication and use them whenever you need to contact them. There is no doubt that communication and tracking are much easier in a digital form compared to a brick and mortar environment.

    The Final Word

    When you move online using the right methods and platforms you may also be able to encourage customers to share their experience on social media such as Facebook, Instagram or Pinterest. When the customers talk about their products and the positive experiences they may have enjoyed, it will work fine as a great publicity at a very low cost.

    Hence, at the end of the day, there is no doubt that moving to a digital form of business from a brick and mortar environment because of Covid may be beneficial for all the stakeholders.

  • WooCommerce And BOPIS For Shop Local Merchants

    WooCommerce And BOPIS For Shop Local Merchants

    E-commerce platforms have become a necessity for any retailer. In today’s world, customers prefer to buy online. The issue is that most brick and mortar stores do not have an e-commerce solution yet.

    Are you one of them?

    If yes, we can undoubtedly help you out. Over the years, we at Web321 have helped countless businesses to create an e-commerce store of their own using WordPress. WordPress being the popular content management system in the world, is, of course, the platform of choice. You might be thinking, but WordPress is a blogging platform. That is not true!

    With the help of woocommerce, a WordPress platform, we have created hundreds of e-commerce stores for our clients. When you look at the e-commerce market, woocommerce has a share of 27%. That’s how popular it is.

    The open-source architecture of woocommerce is what makes it very popular. It consists of various free and premium themes, which indeed allows you to customize the e-commerce platform. There are plug-ins for every aspect of e-commerce like marketing, accounting, shipping, payments, etc.

    Before we help you understand how we can digitize your brick and mortar store, let us look at some of the functionalities of woocommerce.

    What is Woocommerce?

    Woocommerce was the brainchild of Mike Jolley and James Kosters. These 2 were programmers hired by Woothemes in 2011. They created woocommerce in that very year. Since WordPress was already popular, woocommerce became popular quickly.

    So much so that by 2014, it had a market share of 17.7% in the e-commerce industry. By May 2015, WooThemes (Parent company of WooCommerce) and WooCommerce were acquired. The acquirer was none other than Automattic, the parent company of WordPress.com. According to some estimates, the transactions which the woocommerce platform handles today are over $ 10 billion.

    Now that you are familiar with woocommerce let us look at some of the functionalities and features of woocommerce.

    What does Woocommerce have on offer?

    Woocommerce has a lot to offer. Some of the features that help it stand out are:

    • It is easy to customize the woocommerce platform using various themes available.
    • Woocommerce allows you to manage customer accounts and even guest checkouts.
    • Woocommerce helps you in optimizing your store for search engine rankings.
    • Woocommerce provides you with detailed analytics using various plug-ins.
    • Woocommerce helps you in tracking the orders and fulfilling them.
    • The platform even offers you a built-in blog for your e-commerce site.
    • Through various plug-ins, you can add features like product ratings, reviews, tags, and attributes to your e-commerce store.
    • Woocommerce regularly updates the platform and plug-ins to ensure that your store is completely secure.
    • The number of plug-ins available for the woocommerce platform is increasing, is it an exponential rate. The customization options are also increasing with the increasing number of plug-ins.
    • Woocommerce also allows you to upsell and cross-sell your products to generate more revenue.
    • Another great advantage of woocommerce is that if you want to create your plug-in or imbibe your feature, you can custom code that.
    • And much more

    In a nutshell, woocommerce has everything to offer, which an e-commerce store might ask for. Through hundreds of plug-ins available, you can imbibe these functionalities in your store.

    However, the problem is that even with this open-source platform, you will have to boring hours of research to set up an e-commerce store. You will have to gain technical knowledge to modify the templates and other plug-ins to suit your needs. What if we have a readymade solution for you?

    Before we go into that solution, let us understand why retailers need to have an e-commerce store in the first place.

    Why is it a necessity for retailers to have an e-commerce store?

    Over the past decade, the preference of customers to shop online has been pretty clear. In the year 2020, this became more of a necessity rather than a luxury. Some of the reasons why you need to have an e-commerce store are:

    • Tap into the growing market of consumers shopping online
    • Reach out to Millennials
    • Diversify your customer acquisition process
    • Boost your ROI through online marketing and sales
    • Scale up your business

    With the need for an e-commerce store being pretty clear, Let us now highlight how Web321 can help you.

    How can we help you step into the world of e-commerce?

    Web321 hass a flexible e-commerce solution that can help you in digitizing your partial or an entire inventory. You can cherry-pick the items which you want to sell online and which you want to sell on your brick and mortar store. The choice is completely yours. Also, we also take care of every aspect of your e-commerce store.

    For example, we provide you with payment gateway solutions. At the start, we can provide you with payment gateway solutions that charge a normal transaction fee. When your volumes increase, we can help you switch over to payment gateways, charging lower transaction fees. This is just a single way in which we can help you out.

    With complete digitization solutions, we can help you step into the world of e-commerce without lifting a finger.

    Launch Online and BC Merchants

    In February, The BC Government launched a grant program to help businesses retool and get online. We’re ready to help businesses get online: Launch Online. We can build and manage your online store. Best of all: the government may pick up 75% of the costs associated.

    What Is BOPIS?

    Some of the features of our service, which help it stand out include:

    BOPIS stands for Buy Online. Pickup in Store. Many customers prefer to opt for this mode while buying through an e-commerce platform owned by a brick and mortar store. It lets them have a physical connection with the retailer as well. It also makes them more comfortable with shopping online. Moreover, customers need not worry about delayed deliveries, stolen shipments, and so on.

    The hybrid model is certainly gaining more and more traction. According to GlobalData Retail, this format of store pickup had a market share of 33% in 2018. In 2020, this hybrid model has gained even more traction.

    One of the reasons why customers prefer it is to avoid high shipping fees.

    As a business owner, this model makes it easier for you to manage your inventory. Whenever there is a BOPIS order, you can remove the item from the shelf as it has already been paid for. It will help you manage your inventory much better. It will also make you more nimble-footed.

    The good news is that at Web321, we provide you with ready made BOPIS solutions. Once you opt for our service, you can receive such orders right away. It is one of the main highlights of our e-commerce solution.

    • Fully Managed Websites: Our Woocommerce based ecommerce solutions are fully managed. You need not bother about installing plug-ins or custom coding features into it. With every feature like order cards, inventory management, checkout process, and order alerts are taken care of, you need to focus on your business rather than having to worry about imbibing these features in your e-commerce store.
    • One Low Monthly Fee: Web321 does not require you to pay extra for anything. We have low monthly fee plans, which include the features which you need. (More on the plans below). You need not pay extra for every feature which you require. We do not provide you with piecemeal solutions. We believe in providing a holistic solution.
    • Avoid expensive upfront costs: If you approach a web designing company to create an e-commerce store, they will charge you thousands of dollars and an average brick and mortar store cannot afford to shell out such a high amount in a single go. We provide you with low, upfront monthly fee plans, which is much more affordable. Our years of experience ensure that you can digitize your store in no time without having to burn a hole in your pocket.
    • Payment Gateway Integration: We offer various payment gateways, which means that accepting payment online is not going to be an issue for your store. You will not have to approach every payment gateway yourself. We provide you with a ready made solution.
    • Customized E-commerce solutions: Additionally, we also offer you customized e-commerce solutions if you’re looking for the same. We believe in providing our customers with complete freedom when it comes to setting up their e-commerce store.

    With these features, you can be sure to have your e-commerce store up and running in no time with Web321.

    On the other hand, when you try to set up your e-commerce store yourself using WordPress and woocommerce, you will have to deal with a lot of different lenders and expenses like:

    • You will have to shell out approximately $ 30 per month for site hosting. (We work with tried and test web hosting providers.)
    • You will have to register the domain for anywhere from $ 10-$ 30 per year. (Web321 uses a trusted domain registrar like Namecheap)
    • You will have to opt for a premium theme with the untested vendor to set up your e-commerce store. (We use themes built on Divi Foundation. We also offer our clients premium themes ranging from $80 to $ 100 per year)
    • For each additional plug-in which you need, you will have to pay extra. (Apart from the basics, if you need anything else, we can provide such a plug-in for around $ 300/year)

    • You will have to approach multiple payment gateways to get approval from at least one. It can be costly and time-consuming. (We work with trusted payment gateways)

    As you can see, we provide every service you might need to set up your e-commerce store. Rather than having to deal with multiple and untrusted vendors, you can hire us so that we can provide you with time-tested solutions.

    Are you wondering about our plans? Worry not!

    Web321 Plans:

    At Web321, we believe in offering an affordable service to our customers. You can get a fully managed and designed e-commerce store at just $321 per month. At this low fee, you need not worry about large upfront costs. The low monthly fees ensure that you can get managed e-commerce store. The advantage of the same is that you need not hire anyone to take care of the glitches or any other problems. It is a complete, managed website. You just need to focus on the business and fulfill the orders.

    Need more?

    If so, we have two expansion plans as well.

    • “Open for Business” –  eCommerce Booster: When you buy this additional plan, we will set up the e-commerce store, shopping cart, payment gateway, and even digitize 50 SKUs (products) for you. Through this plan, you will have a ready website with listed products that you can market right away.
    • “The Merchandiser” – Inventory Booster: Want to list more products on your ecommerce store? If yes, this is the perfect plan for you. It entitles you to 100 new SKUs (products) for your e-commerce website. If you are expanding into a new niche or are selling more products in your store, this plan can help you with that. It will allow you to sell the new products on your e-commerce store as well. Not only will we create the digital listings of these products but also integrate the right keywords and metadata into it. We also take care of the product images so that you can start marketing these products through your store away.

    In a nutshell, you get 100 product listings for your e-commerce store right away.

    At Web321, we aim to help small retailers take advantage of the e-commerce opportunity. You need not pour in hundreds of thousands of dollars to start or manage an e-commerce store. With our low upfront fee, each and every brick and mortar store can have an e-commerce store of their own. If until now, you were afraid of shelling out a huge upfront cost to set up your e-commerce store, you need not worry about the same now. With our services, you can easily sell every product online through your ecommerce store.

  • Acronyms and What Do They Even Mean?

    What does this alphabet soup of abbreviations even mean? Here’s what these abbreviations translate into:

    3D – 3-dimensional
    AEPS – Aadhar Enabled Payment System
    AI – Artificial Intelligence
    API – Application Programming Interface
    AR – Augmented reality
    B2BB – usiness to Business
    B2C – Business to Consumer
    B2E – Business to Educator
    BOPIS – Buy Online Pickup In Store
    CAGR – Compound Annual Growth Rate
    CEO – Chief Executive Officer
    COO – Chief Operating Officer
    CFO – Chief Financial Officer
    CPG – Consumer Product Goods
    CRM – Customer Relationship Management
    CRM – Customer relationship management
    CMS – Content Management System (like WordPress– the CMS we use at Web321)
    DIY – Do it yourself
    DSN – Digital Supply Networks
    FDI – Foreign Direct Investment
    FMCG – Fast Moving Consumer Goods
    FY – Financial Year
    GDP – Gross Domestic Product
    GST – Goods and Service Tax
    ICYMI – In case you mentioned it
    ICT – Information and Communications Technology
    KPI – Key Performance Indicator
    KYC – Know your CustomerLALos Angeles
    MWS – Managed Web Site
    NFC – Near-field technology
    NLG – Natural Language processing
    NPS – Net Promoter Score
    P2P – Procure to Pay
    PE – Private Equity
    POS – Point of Sale
    RFID – Radio Frequency Identification Tags
    RPA – Robotic Process Automation
    S2C – Source to Contract
    SKU – Stock Keeping Unit
    SME – Small and Medium Enterprise
    SRMS – upplier Relationship Management
    TL/DR – Too long, Didn’t Read
    UBI – Unverisal Basic Income
    UPI – Unified Payments Interface
    USP – Unique Selling Proposition
    VCV – enture Capital
    VRV – irtual reality
    WEF – World Economic Forum

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