Hello fellow blog readers!
Sorry I haven’t posted in a while, if I had any excuse at all it would be that my team and I have been very busy with updates, tweaks and new areas for our website and it’s leading me astray as for as the frequency of blogging is concerned.
You see, we are constantly working on the site and our own internal systems with a view to making them easier and more intuitive and powerful to use.
To give you a better perspective of what life is like in the 4imprint e-commerce area – In my department, we have an entire wall of whiteboards where we brainstorm new ideas. We constantly use these to work out how to design and build improvements for our site, bounce ideas around (and also the occasional game of Pictionary when no one else is looking!). At any given time, we have a list of things we would like to build for the site that fills an entire whiteboard, sometimes more than one. We also have regular informal (and sometimes formal) meetings to discuss these ideas and decide what to concentrate on over the next 3, 6 and 12+ months of development.
There is certainly no shortage of ideas here at 4imprint and knowing which ones to focus on is a huge exercise in priority assignment.You wouldn’t believe how sick my team are of hearing my phrase – “Must do’s, should do’s, could do’s!”
Now, one question I always ask myself when staring at a huge list of development tasks that quite frankly would take a team of 500 coders their entire lifetime to implement is; “Does this idea have true value for our customers and if so, what is it?”
This is actually a very important question, because if the answer is that it doesn’t, then there’s really not much point spending time worrying about the task – there is plenty of ‘low hanging fruit’ that can be picked off the list first.
For example, very occasionally I am asked why our website doesn’t allow you to upload your logo or artwork online so you can play with positioning on the product before placing the order. We certainly could offer this service and in the early days of 4imprint.com (way back in 1995!), we thought long and hard about doing just that. In the end though, there wasn’t a proven benefit for our customers – in fact, it would be a hindrance to their 4imprint experience. Our customers told us exactly the same thing when we asked them as well.
You see, one of the unique services that 4imprint offers is FREE customer art. We have a large and very talented team of artists on site who prepare the customer art completely free of charge and send a proof back to the customer before the order is committed. It doesn’t matter what the source of the art is (we have even had the proverbial hand drawn sketches sent in on napkins – really!)
So, for us, forcing our customers to become their own artists just doesn’t make any sense and would be a huge step in the wrong direction for our customers.
Now, at the other end of the spectrum, there are some ideas that are great ones, but don’t quite make it to the ‘Must do’ list. Instead they linger on the ‘Should do’ one for a period of time until we find time to get to them.
Last week we finally got around to releasing something that has been on our ‘should do’ list for a long time and now that we’ve built it, I personally think it’s fantastic in its simplicity, but huge in the customer benefits department!
We call this new functionality 4imprint zoom!
Starting with our more popular products, we have added the ability for you to zoom right in on the product shots. There is no mistaking what you are ordering because you can zoom so close in that you can see the thread on our 4imprint Business Attache bag, or see the debossed logo of our Silicone Awareness Bracelets.
We have started with our more popular promotional products, and we’re making more and more items ‘zoomable’ every day. Just look out for the zoom logo like the one below
on the product details page.
To make it easier for you to see our items up close and personal, we have taken a selection of these promotional products and created the ‘Zoom Store’
Please take a look and let us know what you think!
Well, I may not post very often, but once I get started I can’t stop! I think I had better sign off for now before this entry becomes even longer!
Until next time…
Richard.