Selling a single product
Tuesday, 27 October 2009To sell only one product on ones website is a practice that becomes increasingly populair - mostly it is a solid marketing strategy. Instead of listing a whole number of products, the website focuses on just one product - providing the visitor with every detail on that product possible: Features, backgrounds, blog, buzz, you name it.
Of course selling a single product is possible using our favorite e-commerce system - Magento - but what about cross-selling and background information? Let's take a look at Magento, but also at our MageBridge integration with Joomla! to see what tools are available.
Multiple domains
Your product collection might be bigger than just one single product, so you will need to link the product-site back to the more general store as well. Thanks to Magento's options for multi-site, you can easily bind one product to a single store, while that store is again bound to a catchy domainname describing that product. Also, this product can appear again in the general products-site without a problem.
This way you're serving two separate websites with the same product-catalog. The exact same thing is possible with MageBridge by setting up a Joomla! instance per website and configuring both MageBridge configurations to use the same Magento site.
However, linking from the product-site back to the general site poses more of a problem. What you are probably looking for is some kind of module that generates links to other products, but also makes sure the URLs are the ones from the general site, not the product-site.
Unfortunately, Magento does not offer this out of the box, and we have not heard of a third party module doing something similar either. MageBridge does not offer this possibility out of the box either. But using the Joomla!-module "MageBridge Products" you can easily create an output override in your Joomla! template to change the default URL into the URL of your general site. Alternatively you can accomplish the same thing in Magento by editing the PHTML-templates.
Focus on one product
The benefit of setting up a single product-site is that the customer will not be confused or distracted by less important information. You can focus on a single product and give the customer a more solid product experience.
To sell a product, the features need to be highlighted but if a customer wants to read more, background information in the form of downloads, whitepapers or blogs should be available. While Magento is less fit for content management, Joomla! is known for its easy use and flexibility in offering different types of content.
Using Joomla! together with MageBridge, you can easily link products to a FAQ section, download-pages or collections of articles (blogs, whitepapers, customer stories). Also, Joomla! can be extended with the JCE editor to make editing articles even more efficient. Downloads can be setup with components like PhocaDownloads or DocMan, FAQ-sections can be configured using regular articles or SimpleLists. And there are many more extensions available to do the job.
Building a community
Just selling the product is a bit outdated. If you have some kind of fancy product, you also want to create a buzz around it. People should have the chance to subscribe to newsletters, add reviews and comments, give suggestions, download marketing info, follow tweets or perhaps even share information, tips or tricks with other customers as well.
Using Joomla! these possibilities also come available. Using a product like Community Builder, JomSocial or Anahita you can create a real community: Users are able to fill in a custom profile of which you can create the fields yourself. MageBridge takes care of the synchronization of this profile with the Magento customer-profile by using profile-connectors. MageBridge even allows you to connect a specific Magento-product to a certain user-group: When a customer buys that product, he/she becomes member of that group right away.
The marketing guy says flash animations
Because the product-site is all about selling a product, the marketing guy probably wants to add as many flash animations as possible. But it would come in handy if you could easily make a connection between the Flash-movie and Joomla! or Magento. Easy is not the word: There are few extensions available that offer something out of the box. More likely you will need to (re)program the Flash-movie manually to make it fit for Joomla! or Magento. Of course, static links in the movie are always an option.
Much more
Of course there is much more to say about setting up a single site for a single product. But both Magento as Joomla! give you all the tools to get the job done properly.