E-commerce - Coffee Creative Studio

Secure and Seamless Transactions: Coffee Creative Studio’s Expertise in Integrating Payment Gateways with WordPress

In the digital age, providing secure and seamless payment options is crucial for businesses to succeed online. At Coffee Creative Studio, we specialise in seamlessly integrating payment gateways with WordPress, ensuring smooth transactions and enhancing the user experience. In this blog post, we will showcase our expertise in integrating payment gateways such as Paygate, PayPal, Payfast, Peach Payments, Stripe, and others with WordPress, highlighting the benefits for your business.

Paygate Integration

Coffee Creative Studio excels in integrating Paygate, a leading payment gateway, with WordPress. By seamlessly connecting Paygate with your website, we enable you to accept a wide range of payment methods securely. With Paygate, your customers can make online payments using credit cards, debit cards, and other popular payment options. Our integration ensures a smooth checkout experience and instils confidence in your customers.

PayPal Integration

Our integrated agency offering includes expertise in seamlessly integrating PayPal, a trusted global payment solution, with WordPress. By integrating PayPal, you can provide your customers with a familiar and secure payment method. Whether it’s accepting payments for products, services, or donations, our integration ensures a seamless PayPal checkout experience, enhancing customer trust and driving conversions.

Payfast Integration

Coffee Creative Studio understands the importance of catering to local payment preferences. With our expertise in integrating Payfast, a popular South African payment gateway, with WordPress, you can provide your customers with a localised and seamless payment experience. By enabling Payfast on your website, you can accept payments in South African Rand (ZAR) and provide multiple payment options, including credit cards, Instant EFT, and more.

Peach Payments Integration

Expanding your business internationally requires catering to different payment methods. At Coffee Creative Studio, we excel in integrating Peach Payments, a robust payment gateway, with WordPress. By seamlessly integrating Peach Payments, you can accept payments from various regions and currencies, catering to a global customer base. Our integration ensures a smooth and secure payment process, boosting customer satisfaction and expanding your market reach.

Stripe Integration

Stripe is a widely recognized and trusted payment gateway known for its developer-friendly features. Coffee Creative Studio specialises in integrating Stripe with WordPress, enabling you to accept payments securely and conveniently. With our integration, you can offer a seamless checkout experience, support multiple payment methods, and leverage advanced features such as recurring billing and subscription management.

Custom Payment Gateway Integration

Apart from the mentioned payment gateways, Coffee Creative Studio has the expertise to integrate various other payment gateways with WordPress. If your business has specific requirements or uses a custom payment gateway, our team can tailor the integration to meet your needs. We ensure that the payment process is secure, reliable, and aligned with your business objectives.

Coffee Creative Studio’s integrated agency offering showcases our expertise in seamlessly integrating payment gateways like Paygate, PayPal, Payfast, Peach Payments, Stripe, and others with WordPress. By leveraging these integrations, we enhance the payment experience for your customers, ensure secure transactions, and drive conversions. If you are looking to provide secure and seamless payment options on your WordPress website, our integration capabilities can help you achieve your goals. Contact Coffee Creative Studio today to experience the seamless synergy of payment gateways and WordPress.

Why Paid Media Needs a Place in Your Marketing Strategy

Are you tired of receiving likes on social media, but having no conversion to sale for your product or service? Have you seen your organic posts’ impressions dwindle or not get the high engagement numbers they used to? Many brands that rely on organic marketing share your woes. In today’s crowded, high-noise media landscape, organic awareness just isn’t enough. Fewer people are seeing posts on social media that are not backed by ad spend. What many may not be aware of, is that this is by design.

Social media platforms, as fun and engaging as they can be, are businesses first, and like all businesses, they exist to make money. Brands that can build a strong organic reach with high engagements don’t need to pay for ads. Thus they are not useful to social media platforms. As a result, these platforms have to make it much harder (using algorithms and other techniques) for brands to achieve their desired results organically. Businesses that aren’t willing to pay to advertise and promote their content simply go unseen.

However, there is a solution to this dilemma – Paid Media.

Organic Media vs Paid Media

The term Organic Media refers to all free content that you post on your pages that you haven’t paid for promotion. When posted organically, that content will appear in the news feeds of people or pages that follow you.

Paid Media links ad spend to results. It refers to all social media posts, display ads, video ads, pop-ups and other multimedia content that are marketed with a budget. If a post in your news feed has a “Sponsored” or “Promoted” tag, that is considered a paid social post.

Pros of Paid Social Media

Organic media has many drawbacks that paid media more than makes up for. Some of the benefits of Paid Media include:

Advanced Targeting

Unlike organic media, paid media gives you total control over who sees your ads. Using a platform’s audience targeting features and demographic parameters, a brand can reach the precise shoppers that it wants to reach. This is a powerful way to both expand and engage your ideal audience at once. Through Paid Media, brands can leverage the various targeting options of social media to capture the attention of leads throughout their marketing funnels.

Amplified Reach

With posts from family and friends now being given priority on Facebook and Instagram, organic reach for brands is declining. Paid media gives brands instant visibility. With a little budget backing your posts, you can easily reach users who don’t exist within your brand’s social network, but are likely to be interested in your brand and its offering. Greater reach equals greater results.

No Vanity Metrics

Vanity metrics are data that make your brand look good, but aren’t indicative of real performance. They also do little to support your marketing strategy, like the “share” feature. Paid Media provides measurable results by providing detailed insight into post effectiveness and can help drive future strategies to support greater ROI.

Fits Any Budget

No matter how small your budget, you can still be effective at Paid Media as the most successful brand accounts on social media are often those with the most attention-grabbing content – not necessarily the biggest spenders. Sponsored posts on Facebook can start from as little as R15, making it an affordable and viable option that caters to all business sizes and budgets.

Brands hoping to be successful on social media, and have that translate to real-world success, will benefit a great deal from Paid Media. To show your content to the right people, in the right place and at the right time, let us run a paid media campaign on your behalf. Get in touch with us today to learn more about our Paid Media services.

Get Your Website POPIA Compliant before 1 July 2021

Time is running out for South African businesses that are yet to comply with the Protection of Personal Information Act (POPIA), a consumer data privacy law which came into full effect on 1 July 2020. If you’ve been a little preoccupied with other things, now is time to kick-start your company’s POPIA compliance journey. Businesses that fail to comply with POPIA before 1 July 2021, whether intentional or accidental, may face administrative fines of up to R10 million.

Let’s avoid that, shall we?

POPIA Compliance in a Nutshell

POPIA outlines a set of conditions for the lawful processing of people’s personal information. It was established to keep personal consumer information protected by providing conditions for how public and private bodies may lawfully collect, process and manage people’s personal information. In so doing, POPIA ensures no unauthorised sharing of third-party data, while also protecting consumers against identity theft, fraud and similar breaches of private information.

Personal information can include anything that can be used as an identifier, such as full names, addresses, photos, video footage, voice recordings, biometric data, education and employment information, religious and political views, criminal records, private correspondence and so forth.

How Coffee Creative Studio Can Help

As a website owner, POPIA affects how you may use cookies, digital information gathering and online tracking of visitors from inside South Africa. One of the easiest ways to ensure compliance is a review and update of your site’s Privacy Policy, with full transparency as to how you intend to store and use the personal information collected. These terms should be made easily accessible on your website via a popup or banner – much like GDPR on European websites. If you break your privacy policy, you break the POPI act. Here are a few examples of POPI non-compliance at play:

Scenario 1: Contact Forms

You are collecting customer information online via digital contact forms. You receive several personal email addresses, which you use at various times to send business newsletters and communicate special offers. If the recipient has not consented to receive that newsletter, by law you are not allowed to send it to them. If you do, you have broken POPIA, and could be held liable should a complaint be lodged against your business.

Scenario 2: Sharing Information with Third Parties

Visitors to your website have granted permissions to use their information for future correspondence sent by your company. You then enter into a joint partnership or campaign with a separate business and share your private database’s information with that company, who then markets to your network. If people have not agreed for their information to be shared and used by a third party, you will have broken POPIA. Thus websites must outline all uses of private consumer data.

POPIA compliance does not need to be an expensive or labour intensive process. Once you have successfully updated your Privacy Policies, Coffee Creative Studio can update your website with the necessary amendments.

Don’t miss the deadline!

No Templates: We Build WordPress-Powered Websites from Scratch

Imagine you’ve stepped into an overcrowded room with 50 strangers inside and each person is wearing black from head to toe. You, on the other hand, are dressed in an assortment of neon colours and a feather boa. All eyes will probably dart in your direction and you’re likely to be remembered a lot more than anyone else. The websites that we build for our clients work the same way: they get attention.

Coffee Creative Studio develops websites that cut through digital noise using WordPress, an open-source web creation platform written in PHP that uses a MySQL database. Over 455 million websites globally are powered by WordPress, which has a 39% market share of all websites and 63.8% of all CMS websites. It is precisely due to this popularity that the platform is always technologically advanced and up-to-date, and among the reasons why we choose to develop using WordPress software.

Private Plugins

From an SEO, Google ranking and server compatibility perspective, WordPress is vastly supported, along with the ability to scale websites with multiple plugins. But not every plugin out there is safe to use. Vulnerable plugins and those hiding malicious code can be exploited by hackers to attack a site. This is where Coffee Creative Studio sets itself apart. We design and build our own private plugins from the ground up. This ensures that the source code is entirely private – not accessible by third parties and not available for download. As such, the integrity of your website’s security remains intact while it delivers safe, enhanced user-experiences that contemporary audiences expect from online sources.

Themes Built from Scratch

Like plugins, we professionally design customised themes from scratch for our clients and do not use any pre-existing WordPress templates. After all, every business is special and deserves to present itself publicly with accuracy and originality. Templates, however, translate into hundreds, if not thousands of somewhat-identical looking websites. However, each custom design that Coffee Creative Studio creates is unique and singular, with bespoke colour palettes, layouts and style elements to ensure that visual aesthetics are 100% on-brand and 100% recognisable by target markets.

Easy Edits & Updates

The idea of editing a template theme may seem simple in theory but it can actually be a weighty task due to restrictions in its build and design. Our custom-builds make it easier for site owners and their employees to make surface edits without any prior coding knowledge. Change artwork, edit text, amend pricing and upload a blog without any assistance. On top of being faster, this trait also makes our custom themes more adaptable. This is important in the long run because a website can’t stay the same forever. It needs to be updated regularly to keep up with the growth of a business, the needs of consumers and emerging new technologies.

If you’d like to learn more about the possibilities of WordPress and what our team can creatively manifest to build your dream website, get in touch with us. There’s never been a more important time for businesses to be online.

Shopify vs WooCommerce – We Have Our Winner

So you want to sell online? Smart move! With the amount of e-shoppers in SA growing as fast as a line for free coffee at Starbucks, an e-commerce platform for your business is becoming one of the best ways to attract new customers, trade round the clock and keep that cash rolling in. Ka-ching!

But where to start? First things first. You need a functional online store. One that is aesthetically pleasing, but also provides shoppers with all the nifty bells and whistles that make online shopping a joy.

Two of the most popular e-commerce solutions for achieving this are Shopify and WooCommerce. But which to choose? Well…

Shopify is a basic, subscription-based service that hosts your online shop for you. Whether you’re experienced in the e-commerce space or just bringing an offline store online to grow your business, the easy-to-use service has a range of tools you’ll need to create a successful online shop.

WooCommerce (or Woo-Hoo-Commerce as we like to call it!) is a plugin that requires hosting and a working WordPress installation to run. WooCommerce lets you modify your store freely and is entirely flexible when it comes to customisations. There’s also the bonus of adding any functionality imaginable to your website with the help of more than 50,000 WordPress plugins. Score!

At Coffee, our Web Developers are kinda famous for creating every web miracle known to man and womankind. They understand that with great power comes great responsibility. This is why we choose to use a platform that allows us to whip up web wonders (try saying that 5 times fast) without restriction – WooCommerce.

Here are 3 reasons why WooCommerce is the obvious choice for Coffee Creative Studios and its clients.

1. Designs that Dazzle

You’re a business like no other, so your online store should be too. Using WordPress we can create for you a one of a kind design that reflects your business’s style and personality to a T. From your colour scheme and typography, to layouts, visuals and other areas that affect the aesthetics of your site – everything is 100% original. It also means that of the 644 million active websites, you will be the only one with your theme, making your brand instantly identifiable to online shoppers.

2. Cool to Customise

At Coffee, we’re always down with the latest and greatest trends in the web development space. Why? Because we want our clients to stay current and have the best online platform possible. With WooCommerce we can custom build you the online store that does everything you want it to. From hosting unlimited products and incorporating discount codes, to SEO, social media integration and more – we know what it takes to execute successful design, web development and maintenance.

3. Bang On the Money

WooCommerce is the more budget-friendly of the two. Shopify charges set monthly fees, but WooComerce on the other hand is a subscription-free service that has many free plugins available, although you do have to pay for some. What makes WooCommerce great is you don’t have to pay for features you may not even need.

If that isn’t enough, Shopify also charges a transaction fee for each sale made via your online and WooCommerce does not.

Now that you know who our clear winner is for building those web wonders, pop into our studio for cuppa and let’s chat about building that online store of your dreams.

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From Garage to Greatness

Once upon a time in a garage far, far away (well, not really, just on the other side of the hill in Westville), a couple of ambitious (and crazy) youngsters took on a freelance job. They had no idea at the time that this little job would be the beginning of an epic adventure.

If you’d told us six years ago that we’d be sitting in a super chic office in the middle of Umhlanga with a staff of sixteen, that we would be the creative agency for The Sharks and would have just landed an incredibly exciting project with The SPAR Group, we absolutely would NOT have believed you.

But, here we are, going from strength to strength and still loving what we do!

From working in a leaky garage to an office in La Lucia and then a move to Umhlanga, it’s been a journey of epic proportions that has certainly kept us on our toes! There has been plenty of laughter, tears, late nights, moments of “what the heck are we doing” and of course, copious amounts of coffee.

Over the last six years, we’ve been fortunate enough to work with some really inspiring brands and people, some of which have included well-known names like, FutureLife®, The Dolphins, Belgotex Sport and Fidelity Security and start-ups, including Republik and We Are Food. In addition to awesome clients, we’ve also been surrounded by a great team of staff (who we consider family)!

Our team of Coffee Beans are the life and soul of our business, after all, without them, we wouldn’t be where we are today. Their passion and commitment to each job has been phenomenal, and every one of them adds their unique flavour to our Coffee Culture. Thank you, Beans, for being an integral part of this crazy, exciting journey.

So, on our sixth birthday, we want to raise our glasses (and mugs) and toast to each and every one of you, big, small, start-up, and everything in between and thank you, from the bottom of our caffeine racing hearts, for trusting us with your brands and business, and allowing us to walk along side you as we help you achieve your business goals!

Here’s to another six and many more to come!

What Is E-commerce?

Exciting. Economical. Efficient.

Just a few reasons why e-commerce is a growing retail trend in South Africa and around the world.

In fact, according to MoneyWeb “online retail continues to grow at a rapid rate in South Africa, having maintained a growth rate of above 20% since the turn of the century.”

So what exactly is e-commerce and how do you go about making it work for you and your business?

To start, it is important to define what e-commerce is.

E-commerce is defined as a “commercial transaction conducted electronically on the Internet.” So, simply put, online shopping.

E-commerce offers a wide variety of benefits to both customer and seller.

Here are just a few:

For the Customer

Around the clock availability
Accessible
Convenient
Offers variety
Fast delivery

For the Seller

Efficient
Reduced costs
Local and international reach

Sounds like a win-win right?

And it is, well, rather it can be. But only if you have the right strategy and tools in place to really leverage your brand and reach your desired audience.

To do this you will need to develop a solid, professional, easy-to-use e-commerce website that effectively reaches your target audience.

Here’s how to get started:

Choose a company that has experience in developing and setting-up e-commerce sites (Hi there!)
Ensure that you discuss and outline all the requirements of your online shopping experience upfront
Product display
Capturing orders
Billing
Shipping
Start the conversation with your bank (you will need to apply to be an online merchant and this can take some time to finalise)
Choose the correct payment portal for your business (your chosen developers should be able to assist with this)
Get sufficient training on how to maintain and operate your online store
Develop an online strategy to promote and advertise your store
Integrate this with your offline processes
Partner with an experienced agency who can help you implement your online and offline marketing strategy

Following these steps, we have successfully assisted some great local brands with their e-commerce businesses, including Jitterbug, We Are Food, and Canvas Print Co.

Each of these sites is unique and was developed to suit the specific offering of the brand to help them successfully achieve their business goals.

“Products can’t all be marketed and sold the same way. This understanding is crucial as the first stepping-stone when starting an e-commerce project. We have to understand the product, its market (how to sell it), and only then, define the scope of the project. We create custom solutions that suit the specific needs of each of our clients, including unique product delivery functionality and pricing structures.

It is great working with our clients and developing exciting solutions that will assist in making their business goals and dreams a reality”- Scott Smith, Head of Development (Coffee Creative Studio).

Looking to start an e-store? Give us a shout and let’s chat about how we can assist you in achieving your e-goals.

“The best website developers in the country! Thanks to you my new website is absolutely stunning. It is definitely something to be proud of. Thanks so much for your hard work and dedication.” – Tamlyn Doig, Jitterbug

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Category: E-commerce