With one of our out-of-town developers visiting the head office, a bunch of us went on our first Photowalk around the Market after work. Unfortunately, we went out on the hottest and haziest evening of the summer, but we still had a great time.

We walked to a great lookout that overlooks Parliament and the Ottawa River, ended up having great fun 'light painting' on the wall of the National Art Gallery. Luckily, no permanent damage was done.

• You can view a few more photos on my Flickr photostream
• Here's Daniel's photostream

When the e-commerce model exploded onto the market, the ability for small businesses to open their doors to the world 24/7 revolutionized the retail industry. While that’s still true, the spread of e-commerce means that online retailers go above and beyond to stand out from the crowd. Beyond rock bottom pricing, there are several easy ways online retailers—both startups and established stores—can jumpstart their e-commerce sales.

1. Put your best face forward with a top-notch storefront. As the old adage goes, you never get a second chance to make a first impression, and this is particularly true among the often-fickle online shopper crowd. Whether you’re just beginning or looking to revamp an existing site, do not skimp on quality design. Create a storefront with a look and feel that will appeal to your customers, with superb navigation and exceptional usability. Use only high-quality photographs of your products to maintain a professional image.

At one time, developing a slick storefront required shop owners to either invest in costly web design software and training to try and build the site themselves or hire an expensive web designer to do it for them. Now, with professionally designed theme stores offered by the leading e-commerce platform providers, it’s never been easier to build an attractive, sleek, contemporary site in a matter of minutes.

2. Make it easy to buy. Ease of navigation is critical—the more complicated it is for your customers to find the products they want (and even those they didn’t yet know they wanted), the more likely they are to pass through without a purchase. Consider how your customers would shop for your products—by style, by application, by size, by feature or some other attribute—and organize your products in a way that most naturally aligns with their shopping style.

Don’t miss the opportunity to up-sell, offer add-on accessories, package promotions or “often bought together” products. Especially for stores offering non-essential or leisure items, this opportunity to capture an impulse buy can be a significant source of revenue. By offering discounts on bundles, you can make the customer feel like they’re getting a great deal and demonstrate that you appreciate their business.

Keep the checkout process as simple as possible. Avoid overwhelming shoppers with too much data input to reduce the number of abandoned shopping carts.

3. Be responsive to customers. While it should go without saying, maintaining exceptional customer service is vitally important in jumpstarting e-commerce sales. Besides processing orders quickly, make it easy for customers to contact you for help or to get their questions answered. When contacted, respond promptly and thoroughly to customer emails and phone calls with a personalized response. While a canned email to confirm receipt of the inquiry is okay, be sure to follow-up immediately with an actual, detailed reply. One shop, Callie’s Biscuits, has found a unique way to engage with even those customers who didn’t make a purchase: by following up on abandoned carts. Each week the store compiles the e-mail addresses of customers who abandoned orders and sends a personal message thanking them for their visit and asking whether they had any technical trouble in completing their order. As a result, many customers who’d forgotten about loading their cart often proceed to placing the order. It also provides an opportunity to gather customer feedback—if there was a specific reason they didn’t place the order, Callie’s can talk with the customer to resolve the issue and possibly turn the problem into a sale.

This kind of “unexpected” responsiveness can be quite refreshing to online shoppers who are more accustomed to being “out of sight, out of mind,” especially with larger retailers.

4. Add a personal touch. Certainly one of the key benefits of e-commerce is the automation factor. The ability to receive and process orders over the web can be a tremendous time and money saver. However, it’s important to maintain a personal touch with your customers that will help them to feel more connected with and appreciated by you and your business. Simple things, like a personalized hand-written note in the shipment box, can go a long way toward maintaining a personal connection with your customers without a significant time and cash investment.

5. Leverage social media. Integrating social media networks with your e-commerce presence is one of the most powerful ways to maintain customer engagement and drive sales. Aside from being extremely cost effective (Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and MySpace are all free services), it allows you to engage in and maintain a dialogue with your customers—and potentially reach an even greater audience through the social media connections of your existing customers.

It’s easy to begin driving sales with social media by posting to your networks about new products, services or other store news. Social network-exclusive discounts can also make your social media fans feel special and encourage them to share the “secret” of your business with their network.

Beyond direct sales, though, social media outreach can serve to position you and your company as an industry expert, a trusted resource for information about your niche market. By building this kind of relationship with customers in an indirect and comfortable way, you can build a loyal and lucrative following and grow your customer base exponentially with ease and relatively little investment.

In today’s crowded e-commerce marketplace, it’s crucial to leverage every available opportunity to differentiate your business and spur sales. With the right tools at your disposal—including a feature-rich, flexible and affordable e-commerce platform that can grow with your business—and creative ways to personalize your offering to truly speak to your customers’ desires, it’s never been easier to jumpstart sales and grow your e-commerce business.

After six months, and over a thousand amazing online stores started, we are proud to announce the end of the Shopify/4 Build-a-Business Contest and of course, the winners!

The participants came up with an amazing variety of ideas, and we loved seeing the kinds of businesses that came out of it all. There was a lot of info, so we thought we’d show you how we saw the contest in the most interesting way we could think of – a Build-a-Business Infographic!

Some 1,378 stores were opened for the contest, all completely new businesses that were started from scratch, and sold more than $3.5 MILLION on Shopify.

And here are the winners. Be sure to check out their stores by clicking below:

Congratulations to all the winners, and everyone else who participated! Hundreds of new, viable businesses were started because of this business and we couldn’t be happier. You can read more about the contest at the New York Times and on Tim Ferriss’ blog.

Here’s an excerpt from Tim’s post, which has an interview with all five winners:

DODOCASE

1) How did you decide on your product? What ideas did you consider but reject, and why?

Going back to our use first use of a Kindle, we were amazed and excited about the idea of an e-reader. At the same time we started to feel a sense of loss about not holding and reading a good book (despite what one might think, reading is at least in part a tactile thing). While we didn’t act on this feeling on the Kindle as the iPad was announced it was clear that we had to do something. Patrick considered many different types of wood materials to compliment the book element and ultimately decided on bamboo based on its eco appeal and its historic relation to paper.

2) What were some of the main tipping points (if any) or a-ha moments? How did the tipping points happen?

Since the iPad form factor was new, we had designed the DODOcase based on Apple engineering drawings. The first a-ha moment was putting the iPad in the DODOcase on launch day. We realized we had not only achieved our design objectives, but it was a way nicer experience using the iPad in a DODOcase than on its own. The second a-ha moment was when Engadget called the DODOcase ‘the Rolls Royce of iPad cases”.

The Engadget connection happened through the viral activity that surrounded DODOcase. Our target market on launch (obviously the early adopter of the iPad) is highly connected and highly social. They wanted to talk about their new toy and we become part of the conversation. These conversations spun up in the ‘echo chamber’ of Twitter and Facebook and quickly made it to the tech blogger community. Josh from Engadget reached out to us directly and we recognized he was a guy we wanted to get our product to quickly (he got case #16).

3) What were your biggest mistakes, or biggest wastes of time/money?

Fighting the urge of distractions has been a challenge for us. We pursued an iPhone 4 case design for a week before checking ourselves and deciding that while we had a cool product design execution would be a distraction from our commitment to our customers.

4) Key manufacturing and marketing lessons learned?

We’ve learned tons about book binding and woodcraft which we will certainly take forward with us. On the marketing side, we’ve learned that having a great story is as important as having a great product. As a small company, you need to connect with your customers on an emotional level as well as on the physical level of the product. We sell DODOcase’s exclusively online which means most of our customers are buying a product without ever touching it. To achieve sales in this way, its important that customers ‘want’ to buy into the story as well as the product. We’ve believe that we are in the middle of a giant cultural shift from the book to the computer (e-reader/iPad). We hope that DODOcase can help ease that transition by providing the tactile experience we’ve all grown up with applied to these amazing new devices.

Let me take a stab at ‘formulating a good story’.

For a small business like DODOcase, it is critical that our products have a story behind them. The seeds of product development for the DODOcase originated when we first held the Kindle. We were amazed by the power and convenience of the Kindle, but immediately felt a sense of loss about the traditional book. That loss was a combination of the tactile feeling of a book as well as the potential that an entire traditional industry (book binding) could ultimately be destroyed by such technology. These feelings became the core of the DODOcase product story. We set out to make a product that helped assuage these feeling as consumers embraced the iPad. Users of an iPad in the DODOcase ‘feel’ like they are reading a hardback book which created a positive association with their past feelings of reading actual books. Further, through our use of YouTube videos and other online messaging, we told the story of how DODOcase is made using traditional book binding techniques.

The combination of a product that delivered on expectations we set and the story we’ve told in our messaging has strongly resonated with customers. At the end of the day, we made a product that we wanted to use and have tried to share liberally the many reasons why we’ve made the product and manufacturing decisions we’ve made.

5) If you were to do it all over again, what would you do differently?

If we had the opportunity to do it all over again, we might look a little more carefully at our choice of wood. Bamboo is an amazing material, but it is also very difficult to work with. Choosing a different type of wood might have made our lives easier.

6) What’s next?

We will continue to expand and invest in our production capabilities. We strive to eliminate the wait to get a DODOcase and to better service our customers. We will be expanding our product line to support additional colors and customizations for corporate clients and universities. We will look at new tablet devices as they come out and decide if the market will be large enough to support a DODOcase model.

We are thrilled to grow our business in the great city of San Francisco and contribute to the local economy.

We can’t tell you all how proud we are to have been a part of hundreds of stories like the one above. A big thank you from the entire Shopify team to all the participants!