HOW2: Add your YouTube Channel to Facebook

Posted on May 21, 2013 by Shopcreator

Increasing the variety and content of your company’s Facebook page is a vital part of building and maintaining an ever-increasing fan base. One of the ways in which you can do this, is to use Facebook Apps.

The app that we’ll be looking at today is one from Involver that can display a YouTube channel direct from your Facebook page. The plugin is free and can be installed using the following link:

Assuming that you are logged in to a Facebook account that can manage your company’s page, the install will ask which of your pages you’d like the YouTube Channels app to be installed on.

Once installed, you can specify the name for your YouTube channel as well as specify other settings, such as which video should be prominent/featured and if comments should be enabled. Your channel name will be the part of your channel’s URL that follows http://www.youtube.com/user/. In our case, the Shopcreator YouTube channel URL is http://www.youtube.com/user/shopcreator so we’d just need to enter shopcreator as our channel name in the app.

Once you’re happy with those settings, you can also change the icon that is displayed for the application. As you’ll see on our Shopcreator Facebook page, we’ve got the YouTube logo to help draw peoples attention to that part of the page.

To change the logo, on your Facebook page click ‘Edit Page’ and then ‘Edit Settings’. Then on the left hand side, click ‘Apps’. In here you should see the “YouTube for Pages” application, simply click ‘Edit Settings’ for that app and a pop up will appear giving you the change to upload your own image and also change the name for the tab.

Now everything should be setup, simply click on the app from your company’s Facebook page and you should see all the latest videos from your YouTube channel. Feel free to check out ours below!

If you have any feedback regarding this article, please drop us a line below. We’d also love to hear if there are any other aspects of social media that you’d like us to explore.

Please take a moment to check out our first article in this series: You, your Business and Facebook

You, your Business and Facebook

Posted on May 16, 2013 by Shopcreator

Facebook is an incredible business tool that can help reach your customer base in ways other platforms and media can’t even touch. The potential to expand your target audience in itself should be enough on it’s own to convince every single business, no matter how big or how small to take their presence on Facebook seriously.

In terms of numbers, at the end of 2012 there were over 32 million people* in the United Kingdom subscribed to Facebook, which is just over half of the UK population.

Let’s debunk a few myths; first of all you don’t need to spend a fortune creating ad campaigns to get your ‘Likes’ rocketing for your business page. Don’t get me wrong, it WILL help and will get things moving at a much quicker pace, but there are plenty of things you can do to help move things along that don’t cost anything, just require a little effort.

The first thing you need to consider is the look and feel of your Facebook page, two defining aspects of this are your profile picture and cover photo. Typically the profile picture will be your company’s logo, this will be the image that appears when your posts are shared/liked or any comments are made by your business. The cover photo however, can require a bit more thought. Facebook give you a 841 x 315 pixel canvas that can be used to best represent your page and hopefully engage people that view it. When you change your cover photo, anyone that ‘Likes’ your page will receive notification that you have done so, which can make it a great way to promote product ranges or promotions. Next you’ll need to set the URL for your Facebook page by visiting the following link while logged in to Facebook:

https://www.facebook.com/username

This will enable you to choose a suitable URL to make your page easy to find, e.g.

http://www.facebook.com/mybusiness

Once you’re happy with the look and feel of your Facebook page it’s time to start letting people know about it. Make sure you tell your friends about the page and ask them to ‘Like’ and share it. These should be the easiest ‘Likes’ you’ll get as friends and family should support you without worrying too much about the content of the page itself.

Which brings us on to content. It is important that you have a varied range of content and make sure you don’t flood your followers with product after product. Types of post can include:

+ Company news
+ Special offers/promotions
+ Competitions
+ New products/ranges
+ Testimonials
+ Charity events
+ Polls/Questions

The more varied and engaging the information is that you post, the greater the chance that your posts will be shared and ‘Liked’ which will ultimately help exposure, retain current followers and encourage new ones.

Over the coming week’s we’ll be reviewing free ways to help boost your company’s presence on Facebook, so keep an eye on our blog and our Facebook page for more (hopefully) helpful tips!

*www.internetworldstats.com

Demo Store – Nailed It

Posted on May 8, 2013 by Shopcreator

Checkout our new demo store ‘Nailed It‘. This site uses our ‘Simple’ template which is free on our Transact Elite and Retailer products. It can also be purchased as a premium template on the Transact platform for £10 per month. The template also includes mobile responsive design functionality.

Homepage
Nailed It Home Page

Department Page
Nailed It Department Page

Product Page
Nailed It Product Page

Basket/Checkout
Nailed It Checkout Page

Need a hand getting setup? Give our first class support team a call on 0845 12 11 400 who will be more than happy to help. The team can also be contacted via email support@shopcreator.com or through live chat on www.shopcreator.com

Site of the Month – May 2013

Posted on May 3, 2013 by Shopcreator

Huge congratulations to Barsupermarket.com, our site of the month for May! We’ve worked closely with the team at MDA over the past few years and are proud to announce them as this month’s winner. They have kindly sent through details of their story and how Shopcreator were able to help them achieve their goals.

“BarSupermarket.com is the UKs leading website for the official retail of genuine and exclusive branded bar merchandise and accessories. Launched in December 2011, BarSupermarket.com is unique in the market thanks to its direct relationship with the brand owners for whom we retail their official merchandise, and has progressed from receiving a few orders each week to now achieving up to 1000 orders per day!

The BarSupermarket.com story first began in 1987 with the creation of specialist fulfilment provider MDA. MDA commenced life as a small organisation storing and distributing branded POS and merchandise for a number of the UKs biggest drinks brands, which following numerous client wins and developing a fantastic reputation in the industry, resulted in a £22 million+ turnover business supported by over 500,000 square feet across 3 major Fulfilment Centres, from which over 1 million parcels a year are despatched.

As an innovator and creative force in the fulfilment industry, and in continuing to work with a number of major global brands (including the likes of Coca-Cola, Stella Artois, Carling, Budweiser, Guinness, Smirnoff Vodka, Irn-Bru, Schweppes etc) MDA identified a way to help clients get POS and merchandise into the trade and consumer markets (where usually it’s provided free) – sell it online. And so, BarSupermarket.com was born…

In making BarSupermarket.com a reality there were of course a number of factors that we needed to get 100% right first time, with our eCommerce solutions partner being absolutely the most important of these. Thankfully, selecting Shopcreator continues to prove every day that we did indeed get this decision right from day one.

Throughout the entirety of our relationship with Shopcreator, all members of their teams have offered countless advice, support and expertise as they have become an extension to our team as we continue to offer the best service quality to our clients – something we could not have achieved without Shopcreator.

One of the greatest things we have seen with Shopcreator is the level of trust we can place in them. BarSupermarket.com was a project delivered on time, on budget and without any hassle, problems or drama that could easily have been experienced were we to select another eCommerce solutions partner. To this day they continue to remain a solid foundation of support for everything we do, and as a result were instantly selected as our partner of choice for several other eCommerce projects we have subsequently launched following the success of BarSupermarket.com.

We would highly recommend Shopcreator as an extremely reliable eCommerce partner to anyone looking to launch, and significantly improve, their online service offering.”

Would you like to be featured as our Site of the Month? Simply email siteofthemonth@shopcreator.com and let us know all about your Shopcreator journey.

HOW2: Resend an IPN from Paypal

Posted on April 29, 2013 by Shopcreator

Occasionally there is a need to resend an IPN (Instant Payment Notification) from Paypal for a particular transaction. In this guide, we will show you how you can do this.

Step 1
Log in to your Paypal account.

Step 2
Under the “My Account” tab, hover over “History” and click on “IPN History”.

Paypal

Step 3
If you cannot see the transaction you want, use the search to display the dates required.

Step 4
Select the transaction(s) required by clicking the check box to the left it.

Step 5
Click on “Resend Selected”.

If the option to view “IPN History” is not available, you may need to enable Instant Payment Notifications. To do this please follow the below steps:

Step 6
Under the “My Account” tab, hover over “Profile” and click on “My Selling Preferences”.

Paypal

Step 7
Under “Getting paid and managing risk” click “Update” on the “Instant payment notification” section.

Paypal

Step 8
Click “Edit settings”.

Step 9
Enter the following in the “Notification URL” field:

https://www.safepayments.com/mall/secure/payPalSTDNotify.cfm

Select “Receive IPN messages (Enabled)” and click Save. You should now be able to view your IPN history by using following steps 1-5 above.

Should you have any questions, please don’t hesitate to ask!

The Shopcreator Support Team
support@shopcreator.com