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Trender recently deployed an internal Stable Diffusion instance to streamline our content creation projects and so far the results have been impressive.

Running on modest consumer level GPU compute hardware, it’s quickly becoming apparent we’re on the cusp of a revolution with regard to how we create content for both online applications and marketing material.

For those not familiar with the current state of play in the AI space, or more precisely the image generation (or image synthesis) space, Stable Diffusion is a tool that allows you to create completely original image content from a text prompt.

With a varied selection of pre-trained models available, Stable Diffusion can create anything from highly detailed real world imagery to fantasy, cartoon, vector or icon based images and a huge variety of art styles in between.

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Trender was recently engaged to implement an online membership database for an Australian association with a moderate number of members.

This client already had a Wordpress website and a process for onboarding members and we were tasked with building an online portal where both potential clients could sign up and existing members could renew.

We looked at several of the membership systems available including MemberPress, WooCommerce Memberships and Paid Memberships Pro comparing features against our requirements – this was a tricky task as each of the choices only had a subset of features, forcing us to priortise must haves versus wants.

Memberships can have a duration and your members can often be in more than one membership group so planning out a structure including timelines and benefits is something I’d strongly recommend doing before you start deciding on which platform to use.

Another benefit to membership systems is a self service portal. These can include such things as a  purchase and invoice history, a rewards program and perhaps even a sneak peak at future specials. 

WordPress delivered by Trender is a great platform for your club or organisation.  Trender can help you get up and running with your own online presence or we can host and maintain it on our managed Australian based server instances.

If you’d like to discuss the benefits of hosting WordPress with Trender please click the article link below to be taken to our website.

The year 2020 has thrown many of us a curve ball, some businesses are temporarily closing while others are shifting their sales online… this might be a temporary measure but it can also be an attractive alternative sales channel if time permits. Personally, I’ve been a fan of online shopping for 40 years and in that time I’ve really come to appreciate the businesses that have put in that little extra effort to present a quality online shopping experience. Here are three ways your eshop can be extended to provide a high quality shopping experience.

1. Give your customer their identity – some customers might visit your shop and only transact a single time, others will come back time and time again to purchase from you. A great little touch for return customers is to give them a unique identity to your site – using this identity customers can log in to a portal and through this will feel like they have an ongoing relationship with you. Portals can include such things as a purchase and invoice history, a rewards program and perhaps even a sneak peak at future specials.

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What are the best e-commerce platforms? – it’s a question that gets a lot of coverage with business owners looking to pivot due to the ongoing Covid-19 issue.

Facebook recently launched their “Shops” initiative which will allow an e-commerce front end on business pages. We’re quite excited with this direction Facebook are taking as it is a big vote of confidence in the value of e-shops and it will allow many small business to jump right in to creating their first online shop without needing specialist experience.

There are a plethora of choices when it comes to running your e-shop, including dedicated tools such as Shopify, Woo-commerce and ebay or more generic platforms including Wix, SquareSpace and SiteBuilder. Each choice will come with it’s own pros and cons including the level of customisation, the ability to integrate with your website and of course the cost.

Our general rule of thumb when choosing any portal that allows customers to trade with you online is to make sure you look at how well it integrates with your current business ecosystem. Does it talk to your POS system?, can it manage inventory and generate reports for tax purposes easily and can it be scaled to grow with your business?

No matter which solution you choose we hope that you have great success extending your business online, and we’d like to remind you that Trender can help with your e-shop integration and more importantly the way you market it using data driven trend analysis.