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Upgrade your Ecommerce Website with the Launch Online Grant Program

Launch Online Grant Program
Upgrade your online shop with up to $7500 provide by the BC Launch Online Grant Program

The Launch Online Grant program provides funding to B.C.-based small and medium sized businesses to create an online shop and/or improve their ecommerce website experience. This should attract new local customers and expand to new markets. The grant will pay for up to 75% of eligible expenses, up to a maximum of $7,500 per business.

This is a great opportunity for any business in British Columbia to improve their e commerce by upgrading their website and is equal to a 75% discount

Who is eligible for this ecommerce website grant?

All applicants must meet the following criteria

  • The business is owned by a B.C. resident or residents;
  • The business’s sole or primary operations are located in B.C.
  • The bc based business:
    • Is currently operating;
    • Is registered in B.C.;
    • Employs less than 149 B.C. residents;
    • Pays taxes in B.C.
    • Maintains a
      • Business number
      • GST number
      • PST and WorkSafeBC number (where applicable)
    • Generated sales of more than $30,000 in the past year (in 2019, or in the year preceding the application)
    • Has repeatable products, or in the case of artists and jewellers, individual items that have slight differences (i.e. paintings or rings)
    • Does not currently have an online store or has an online store that has no more than 3 of the following 5 identified online store features
      • Customer registration and information security features
      • Shopping cart and order management capabilities
      • Payment processing options including application of appropriate taxes and shipping costs at time of ordering
      • Product catalogue, search and inventory status
      • Website analytics and reporting capabilities

Funding will help cover up to 75% of costs for expenses such as:

  • Service provider costs:
    • Platform and website development
    • Copy and online content writing
    • Developing an online inventory of goods and products
    • Pictures (including hiring a photographer), stock photos or related graphics needed
  • Digital customer costs:
    • E-commerce platform subscription (up to 1 year)
    • Online advertising (up to 1 year)
    • Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
    • Creating banners and other embedded advertising
  • Staff training to manage the online shop, learn about digital marketing, etc.

Expenses to build an online shop, to improve existing e-commerce platforms and digital customer acquisition activities, are eligible for funding. The grant will pay for up to 75% of eligible expenses, up to a maximum of $7,500 per business. The grant recipient must cover 25% of the cost, which can be covered from other programs or directly by the businesses. The funds must be used to hire B.C.-based company(ies) develop the online store

Note: The Launch Online Grant program is supporting  a rapid response for businesses and is accepting applications from businesses ready to start and finish their online shop in 12-weeks. Grants will be awarded in the the order they are received. This means the sooner you apply the better because once the available funds are used up, the grant program will close

What is the Application process for the Launch Online Grant Program?

  1. Develop a grant proposal that indicates how you will use the funds.

    The funding should be broken out into the different expenses related to the development, management and improvement of an online shop and must support e-commerce. The 3 cost groupings are online shop development, digital custom acquisition and training costs
    The proposal should include details on funding being used for:

    • Customer registration and information security features
    • Shopping cart and order management capabilities
    • Payment processing options including application of appropriate taxes and shipping costs at time of ordering
    • Product catalogue, search and inventory status
    • Website analytics and reporting capabilities
    Funding recipients MUST use local B.C. service providers to complete contract work to build or improve their online store. As a BC based Website company, we are already working with clients on proposals and applications for this grant. We would be happy to talk with you about how we can help with a proposal and application for your company website upgrade

  2. Complete the online application

    Complete the online application demonstrating that you meet the eligibility criteria and submit your online shop proposal..

  3. Applicants will be contacted within three weeks with the outcome of their application

Program timelines

The building of the online shop and all other activities related to the program must be completed within twelve weeks after approval. Following project completion, the business must submit an expense summary report to Alacrity Canada. The expense summary report must list all expenses incurred in completing their online shop and improvements to the existing online shop. 

How do I know what I need to get started with an ecommerce website?

This is where an experienced website and marketing company can help you define what you need to get started and build up your online sales

We have already started helping customers with their grant proposals and applications. We can run a free audit of your existing website and suggest eligible upgrades, or talk with you about getting your ecommerce website up and running

We already have an ecommerce website – what improvements can we make that are covered by the grant?

An effective, easy to navigate ecommerce website is essential for success in online sales. From showing in search results pages, clicking through to your site (Customer Acquisition) to finding the product they want (Store catalogue, search / filter and inventory status). As well as easily being able to purchase (customer registration, payment processing, order fulfilment and shipping. 

Examples of eligible Ecommerce website functionality and enhancements are

  1. Customer Registration
  2. Synching customers with customer database via a CRM  / Email marketing too
  3. Targeting and segmenting customers for automated email followups (feedback, new customer welcome gifts, repeat customer rewards) or product recalls
  4. Setting up Cart abandonment capture and follopwup
  5. Training videos product usage
  6. Setup logic for cross-sells and upsells via the cart
  7. Create Retail and wholesale pricing options
  8. Order management – shipping calculators for automatic shipping calculation / timings / tracking numbers based on cart contents
  9. Payment processing (options of credit cards, paypal, COD, invoiced, local pickup
  10. Improve UX (user experience) on mobile
  11. Improve product search, filtering (“to be like amazon”)
  12. Search Engine optimization so that new customers find your products
  13. Analytics and reporting – setting up google analytics / facebook pixel properly to track site visitors, conversions and sales in real time, and keep a cost of conversion

In summary, this is a fantastic opportunity to upgrade your online store (or to start an online store) at a 75% discount.

We would love to help our fellow British Columbians get started on their ecommerce website upgrade, and will work with you to write the proposal to accompany your application. Let our expertise with ecommerce combine with your company and product knowledge to boost your bottom line with online sales

Contact us today to get started with your ecommerce upgrade

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How to deal with them Spam Search Backlinks

Have you seen a sudden rise in spammy backlinks to your site

https://mydomain.com/?s=%F0%9F%92%BD%E2%A0%A9%F0%9F%9F%A0%20www.FastPharmacy.store%20%F0%9F%9F%A0%E2%A0%A9%F0%9F%92%BD%20Acheter%20cialis%20en%20pharmacie

If you have and you can’t figure out why or what to do then follow this list of actions

  1. Is your Error logging turned on
    define('WP_DEBUG', true);

    This can be exploited by spammers to force and error message to show their payload of links to dubious sites.
    Fix: Turn it off!. Check your wp-config.php and replace the above line with
    define('WP_DEBUG', False);
  2. Change your search query parameter so that these links just default to your domain, and don’t show a search page
    add_filter('init', function(){
    global $wp;

    $wp->add_query_var( 'search_query' );
    $wp->remove_query_var( 's' );
} );


add_filter( 'request', function( $request ){
    if ( isset( $_REQUEST['search_query'] ) ){
        $request['s'] = $_REQUEST['search_query'];
    }

    return $request;
} );
  3. Replace your search form to ensure that the new parameter is use 
        <form class="search-form" method="get" action="https://www.mydomain.com/" role="search"><label class="search-form-label screen-reader-text" for="searchform-1">Search this website</label><input class="search-form-input" type="search" name="search_query" id="searchform-1" value="" placeholder="Search this website"><input class="search-form-submit" type="submit" value="Search"><meta content="https://www.mydomain.com/?search_query={search_query}"></form>

Once you have done this, the spam links should start to fade away as anyone clicking on them just ends up on your home page

The nature of these links, and the pages they are coming from means that Google will mostly ignore them anyway, and they will fade away quite quickly

How to Fix Gravity Forms Not Sending Email Confirmations

Gravity Forms Not Sending Email Confirmations is a big problem that many WordPress Websites using Gravity Forms have. Contact form notifications are not arriving in their inbox when a visitor fills out a form on their site.

I love Gravity Forms. It is my go-to forms builder and I have owned a developer license for nearly a decade (This means I can use it on all my customer sites with no extra cost to them)

This is a huge issue!  Form entries could be new leads that will  go unnoticed, and will move on to your competitor. Or support requests go unnoticed leading to dissatisfied customers. And the worst thing? You might not even realise! You don’t know what you don’t know, so unless you check your form submission entries every day, you are completely in the dark and unaware you are missing submission email Confirmations

There are a couple of issues that cause this issue

  1. Hosting: Email is not handled by WordPress. It hands off  responsibility for sending emails to the hosting server using the wp_mail() function. Some hosting environments are not setup correctly to do this, and you email notifications never work. You will not get any WordPress notifications (comment approvals, site upgrade information, new user information). This is a bigger issue than just Gravity Forms. The quick solution is to change host to one that is setup correctly for hosting a  WordPress site
  1. Your host blocks your specific site from sending mail. This can occur if you are sending out lots of emails from your site, and have reached your sending limits. This could be unintentional – perhaps you are getting lots of comment spam notifications, or are selling so making so many sales through your online-store, you email volume is too high for your host – again the solution is to move to a better hosting setup
  2. Emails are sent but are not arriving in your inbox. This is what I see most of. The problem is that the email being sent from your site looks like spam and is not making it through your email inbox.

Fixing this is a stepped approach – starting with the most easy fix, and if that works – Great! However, if not step up to the next. The problem is caused by a combination of your website host (is that IP address blacklisted due to another site on the server being blacklisted), your domain (is your blacklisted?), the email sending method (wp_mail() or SMTP) ,your domain authentication, the email client you use (Gmail, Hotmail, MS Office) and where you use it (PC, Mac, android, iphone etc). Within these 6 parameters, there are a huge number of variations, so it is a case of finding the fix that works for you

Step 1: Notification setting

Gravity forms allow you to set a “from” email and “reply to” email – in the early days, you could use the actual email address of the form submitter, and reply to them too. Those days have gone. Doing this will be a red flag to your inbox spam filter – which makes sense when you think about it – it is actually “pretending to be from “John Doe” .. when in fact it is from your website or blog (so the “hidden” email headers that carry all kinds of authentication information will be mismatched and this screams “SPAM” to the filter guardians of your inbox) And.. setting a reply to email different to the “from” email – that is another red flag-  it is a phishing technique used by scammers. The filters will block it

Instead use

From Name: WordPress Website
From Email: no_reply@yourdomainname.com
Reply to: no_reply@yourdomainname.com

Email Confirmations not being sent Fix Gravity forms

And, you need to make sure that your Send to Email address is different from your “From address”. This is another technique used by the scammers, so again, it will be filtered out

2) Step 2: Change the way WordPress handles delivery

This is a little harder and requires you to switch how your email is handled on your WordPress website – from wp_mail() to SMTP

There are plugins that do this and the instructions are fairly simple to follow. I usually use

Post SMTP Mailer/Email Log – which has a great setup wizard and email testing / logging function

3) Step 3: Authentication

Is you domain email authenticated sufficiently – if it’s not then any emails from @yourdomainname.com could end up in spam (whether sent from WordPress, or directly from you)

There is a great way to test this out – https://www.mail-tester.com/ – go to this site and follow the instructions, and within a couple of minutes you will get a mail score, and instructions on SPF, DKIM and DMARC authentication records you need to add to your domain DNS (which are records stored against your domain)

If your domain is authenticated for sending emails, and you are using the techniques listed above, you should be getting email notifications after gravity form submissions.

However, there is always more you can do. I have found that setting up and authenticating a sendgrid email account (free version) and outsourcing all website email notifications to Sendgrid combined with a SMTP plugin is the most robust way of ensuring emails are being sent

And, for extra security (and for Google Analytics tracking purposes) you should always try and setup your Gravity form confirmations to go to a separate page.

Gravity Forms Notifications

Doing this means you will see a count of visits to this page on your google analytics reports. This count should match the form submissions you have received for the time period and is a useful check that all notifications are arriving as they should

Do you need help with Gravity forms?

Email Notification Fixed. Guaranteed.
No Fix. No Charge

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Product Structured Data Markup for Woocommerce Product

Add this to the head of your single-product.php page in the woocommerce directory of your theme. This will enable a rich result on Google, Rich pin on Pinterest etc

add_action( 'wp_head', 'ns_tc_product_json_ld' );
function ns_tc_product_json_ld(){
    global $product;
    ?>
    <script type="application/ld+json">
        {
        "@context": "http://schema.org/",
        "@type": "Product",
        "name": "<?php echo $product->get_name();?>",
        "image": 
            "<?php echo genesis_get_image(
                array(
                    'format' => 'url',
                    'size' => 'full',
                    
                )
                );?>",
        
        "description": "<?php echo get_post_meta(get_the_ID(), '_yoast_wpseo_metadesc', true);?>",
        "mpn": "<?php echo $product->get_sku();?>",
        "brand": {
            "@type": "Brand",
            "name": "My Brand"
        },
        <?php
        if ($product->get_review_count() > 0) { ?>
      "aggregateRating": {
        "@type": "AggregateRating",
        "ratingValue": "<?php echo $product->get_average_rating();?>",
        "reviewCount": "<?php echo $product->get_review_count();?>"
      },
      <?php } ?>
      "offers": {
        "@type": "Offer",
        "url": "<?php echo get_permalink();?>",
        "priceCurrency": "GBP",
        "price": "<?php echo $product->get_price();?>",
        "priceValidUntil": "2020-12-31",
        "itemCondition": "https://schema.org/NewCondition",
        "availability": "https://schema.org/InStock",
        "seller": {
          "@type": "Organization",
          "name": "My Organization"
        }
      },
      "sku": "<?php echo $product->get_sku();?>"
    }
</script>
<?php
}

Interlinking Local Citations using Yoast Schema

For Local SEO citations are still very important to local SEO. This is because there are 3 main factors which Google will use to index and populate local search results

  1. Relevance – the local business needs to be both relevant to the searchers intent and local (geo-relevant)
  2. Proximity / Distance – how close is the business to the searchers location
  3. Prominence – how well is the brand established online. The search engines rank the prominence of a brand based on information from across the web – links, articles and directories.

Prominence of a business is directly impacted by the total number of brand documents that exist – the more documents (articles, directory listings, reviews and links) you have, the higher the prominence rating will be. This why local SEO needs to include a Digital Knowledge Management (DKM) strategy to create and manage these entities

Local business Citations – directory listings, reviews, press releases are a solid way to build your prominence, but as with all things SEO, the “good old days” of any link will do, are gone. Marketing agencies creating thousands of listings on spammy junk sites are not helping at all – Google AI will root out and ignore brand documents from low quality sites – it doesn’t count citations that have not been indexed.

How do I get my citation listings indexed?

Encourage the search engines to index your citation listings using the following methods

  • Add Indexable citations to a page on your website
  • Add citations in your organization schema- SameAs – use the snippet below to add to Yoast WordPress SEO schema on your site
  • Add Indexable citations to the bottom of YouTube Video Description

Adding Citations to Yoast WordPress SEO schema

Yoast WordPress SEO 12.1 included a new filter – wpseo_schema_organization_social_profiles to filter an organization’s social profiles in the schema output. You can use this filter to modify social profiles (sameAs attribute) in the Organization schema object.

Note: you don’t have to use this just for adding social profiles – any websites you are associated with can be included

Interlinking your citations can be further enhanced by adding a list of follow links to all your business citations on a page on your website.

Why do I get ‘Storage not available. Aborting hit.’ with Google Analytics?

Whilst trying to figure out why a client Google Analytics stopped tracking, we happened across this little issue that seems to surface in the lasted Chrome update – Version 83.0.4103.97

Google Analytics stopped sending hits -and burrowing down through the Google analytics debugger information in the console window – the message appeared

 Storage not available. Aborting hit.

A search of Google suggested that the domain was an issue, and when we checked the domain being used in WooCommerce Google Analytics Plugin settings – the domain had the https:// included. We removed that so just the basic domain. This solved the problem, and google analytics was able to record the hits from site visits again

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