Latest Articles from Network Solutions Education Center - Sell Online

Take Sales From Everywhere

Tue, 10 May 2011 16:27:02 -0400

The best sales tool you have is probably at your fingertips already. Not a computer. Not a register. Not a laptop. Not a tablet. Keep looking... Just reach for your trusted, smartphone. Now you can use it to make sales anywhere that life may take you.

In order to start processing sales using a mobile phone, you will need the following:

SmartPhone: Chances are, you already have one and know how to use it -- 74 million consumers in the United States already shop from their mobile devices (Source: InMobi study, 2011). In addition, the smartphone market has now surpassed the PC market. Smartphones outsold PCs in Q4 of 2010 101 million to 92 million (Source: IDC).

Merchant Account: A merchant account is a special agreement with a bank that allows you to accept credit card payments online. Credit card transactions are the most popular method of online payment and the only way to accept credit card payments online is to have a merchant account. It is very important that you read the terms and conditions determine which merchant account, as well as which provider, is best for your business. Some companies will advertise merchant accounts at a lower rate than any other company, but your rates will creep up over time. Eventually, you're paying more than you should. Make sure to consider transaction costs, percentage rates, plan descriptions and understand all fees (including whether application, setup or annual fees are charged).

Payment Processing Mobile App: Offered by many companies, these apps allow the required processing software to be downloaded and installed on your phone. Besides making sure that the app is supported by your phone, you will need to understand if any equipment, in addition to the app, is required for credit card processing.

Optional Equipment: If you are taking many orders via your Smartphone, you may want to invest in additional hardware. These devices make it quick and efficient to take sales outside of an office by providing features such as the ability to swipe a credit card, manage inventory, scan barcodes and/or provide a printed receipt. The design, functionality and price of these devices vary across providers.

There are also some other key factors that you should consider, including:

Payment Card Industry (PCI) Compliance: Use only companies that meet PCI compliance standards. These standards were enacted to protect personal information and ensure security when transactions are processed using a payment card. All members of the payment card industry (financial institutions, credit card companies and merchants) are required to comply with these standards if they want to accept credit cards.

Customer Support: Make sure you can get help when you need it. Look for knowledgeable, 24/7 live phone support, as well as, Chat support.

Ability to Integrate with Your Website: The ability to integrate sales and orders taken via mobile phone with your ecommerce site is often overlooked. However, if you have a high volume of sales, this feature makes managing both sources a snap.

So if your business takes you away from the office or if you are never in an office, you can now process sales wherever you may travel. Download the free, nsMobilePay^TM iPhone® app.

How to Shop for a Merchant Services Provider

Mon, 22 Nov 2010 15:11:52 -0500

Finding a partner for your credit card processing needs can be time consuming. So, here's a guide to help you streamline your search, with questions to ask as you call around.

Keep in mind: In addition to aggressive rates, you will want a processor you can trust. At $3,000 per month in Visa/MasterCard sales volume, the difference between a discount rate of 2.19% and 2.09% is only $3.00. Be sure to investigate the value-added services that the processor offers.

Questions to Ask

Business Best Practices

Are there live people answering your phones?

How long have you been in business, and how many employees do you have?

What is your customer satisfaction rate?

Do you work out of a commercial office space?

What references you can send to me?

Are your services PCI/CISP Certified?

Are you familiar with PCI/CISP Certification?

What fraud-prevention tools do you offer?

Is there an early termination fee?

Do I have to lease your equipment, or can I buy it outright?

How long does it take to get approved?

How long does it take to get my deposits?

Can I accept American Express and Discover cards using this account? What are the set-up fees? Are there any additional fees?

Tell me about your chargeback support. What is your turnaround percentage on chargebacks before a merchant gets involved?

Service & Support

Will I have my own dedicated team for all of my merchant account needs?

What gateway do you use?

Who handles your tech support? Is it done in-house for the gateway?

How long have you been working with your gateway?

Do you offer training on the gateway?

Is the gateway PCI/CISP Certified?

Does your gateway include a virtual terminal?

What is your gateway set-up fee?

What is your gateway per-transaction charge?

Does your gateway support recurring billing? What are your rates for these services?

What are customers saying about your gateway?

Regarding Rates

What is your discount rate?

What is your per-transaction charge?

What is your AVS charge?

What is your mid-qualified rate, and which card types fall under this category?

What is your non-qualified rate, and which card types fall under this category?

What is your monthly statement fee? Do you charge any other monthly fees?

What is your monthly minimum discount charge?

What is your annual fee? Do you charge any security fees?

What is your set-up fee?

What is your chargeback fee?

What is your retrieval request fee?

How Search Marketing Can Help Drive Your Ecommerce Business

Fri, 08 Oct 2010 11:41:25 -0400

Increasing your website visibility on the Internet helps drive more traffic to your business, prompts more inquiries for your goods and services, increases leads, and potentially generates more sales.

To understand search engine marketing, you first need to understand how things once worked with the traditional Yellow Pages®. For years, people turned to the "phone book" to locate local businesses. Business owners understood that advertising in the Yellow Pages was a critical step in attracting customers.

Consumers now turn to the Internet to search for what they need, both to buy locally and to buy online. The Web connects businesses and consumers like never before. But getting found by buyers requires a bit more effort on your part, as a business owner, than simply deciding which category you want your ad to appear in the Yellow Pages. It takes understanding several important search engine marketing concepts: keywords, search engine rankings, and Search Engine Optimization (SEO).

What is Search Marketing?
The goal of search marketing is to attract targeted traffic to a website. Consumers conduct searches by entering a search word or phrase (referred to as a keyword) into a search engine such as Google® or Yahoo!®. Two types of results are then generated -- free "organic" search results appear and paid, or "sponsored" results. Free listings are displayed on the main area of the results page. Most search engine pages display 10 results per page; but there can be thousands of listings and hundreds of pages. Paid advertising results usually appear at the top of the page, highlighted in a box, as well as along the right side of the page.

The majority of people who conduct searches only select from the first page of listings, although some will go two to three pages deep (that's why appearing within the top 20 to 30 results is considered to be a high ranking.) Search Engine Optimization (SEO) refers to the efforts to generate free organic listings high on the results page, while search engine marketing, also known as Pay Per Click advertising (PPC) involves paid listing placement.

Search Engine Optimization
The ultimate goal of SEO is to achieve top ranking in search engine results. To do that, you need to take steps to improve or enhance your ecommerce website in such a way that it will consistently display more prominently near or at the top of the results page.

There are two primary areas of any site that can be improved or optimized. The first involves analyzing the website's underlying code, architecture, and content - the way it is built. The second involves keywords, those words or phrases that people enter into search engines in order to find what they are looking for. A site needs to have searchable keywords woven in a natural way throughout its content in order to be found.

How Do Search Engines Rank Sites?
Search engines use "spiders" to read through the contents of websites. Spiders go out and "crawl" the Internet by following links, indexing Web pages as they go. They read the content found on a site and follow all of the related links. Search engines ignore the layout of a site and look only for content that is relevant, up-to-date, and unique (not duplicated elsewhere on the Web).

For ecommerce sites this can be a huge challenge. That's because ecommerce sites frequently sell the same products as their competitors and even showcase the same manufacturer-provided product descriptions. In addition, sites are often designed to show one product per page. If several colors or sizes of a product are offered, it appears as if each of the many different Web pages is a duplicate (and that doesn't add up to fresh content as far as a search engine spider is concerned.) The end result: a slew of sites are featuring the exact same items and content, showing several choices for those items, and getting ignored by the spiders.

Ways to Optimize Your Site
So what can you do to increase the search engine value of your ecommerce site? Now that you understand some of these concepts a little better, here are seven steps you can take to optimize your website to improve your rankings:

1. Identify keywords. Begin by generating a preliminary list of keywords that focus on your products and services, your company's name, and related subjects. Then focus on developing a list of variations of those words, using common typos.

There are tools on the Web to help you identify the right keywords - the keywords that consumers are using to find businesses and products like yours. Google® offers a free keyword tool and provides search statistics for each word or phrase. It can be found at: https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal?defaultView=2

Another tool, Wordtracker, has both free and a paid subscription version. The free version can be found at: http://freekeywords.wordtracker.com/

2. Add those keywords to your site. After you identify a good working list of keywords, you need to add them within the content of your site as appropriately as possible. Search engines are very sophisticated and do not like bogus or "forced" placement of keywords on a Web page. The words or phrases must be contextually relevant to what appears on the page.

In addition to revising the content, insert keywords into your website's titles, Meta tags, directory names, and HTML code to describe images that appear on the site. (Meta tags are the descriptions that appear as part of the search engine results.) Be sure these insertions are unique to each page, including product pages. Some ecommerce providers include this in the set-up of the ecommerce site.

3. Edit your content to be different. To a degree, inserting keywords into your product descriptions will help make your content distinct. But you can do more. Use the manufacturer's description merely as a starting point for writing your own. Include customer reviews or add some personal thoughts about the product.

4. Submit the site to search engines and directories. With your site content updated, you're ready to alert the world. Site submission tells the search engines that a website exists and is ready to be indexed by spiders. Sites can be submitted manually, page by page; or there are tools that can help with the submission process. In some instances, hosting providers offer site submission as part of their service offering.

5. Build inbound links. Building links is like building relationships on the Web (and serach engine spiders love links). A link is a clickable word or graphic on a Web page that takes the viewer to another place. When two sites on the Web are linked to each other, search engine spiders will follow those links and discover the next site. Link popularity is based on the number of sites linking to a website, as well as the relevance of inbound links in relation to content on that site. Links can be one-way links (inbound links only); reciprocal links (where two sites link to one another); and blog links, which can attract more inbound links if they are well-written and interesting.

6. Measure results. Once you've made it through the steps outlined above, it's time to monitor how your online marketing efforts are doing! Use your keyword list to conduct your own searches to determine if your business is rising in the results rankings. This will enable you to capitalize on what's working and eliminate what's not. But give yourself time to see results from your efforts; achieving a high ranking can take up to 6 months. Use a service like Google Analytics will help you discover which keywords are working the best and which other websites are sending visitors to you.

7. Keep up the good work! Optimizing your site is an ongoing process that involves maintenance and effort. Continue to add new content and keywords. Stay current on marketing techniques. Keep building links and monitoring which ones drive the most traffic to your site. And, consider learning more about paid search marketing, so you can begin to incorporate that approach into your strategy.

With a solid understanding of search marketing and a plan for how to launch your own search marketing efforts, you can begin to successfully drive more traffic to your ecommerce site and ultimately go farther in increasing your sales.

Maximize your PPC Campaigns for the Holidays

Tue, 17 Aug 2010 10:40:40 -0400

There are several things you can do to properly maximize your PPC campaigns for the holiday season. Don’t assume that what has worked well for you during the rest of the year, will work the same during the holidays. By making a few tweaks now, you can capitalize on that huge increase in holiday traffic.

For each ad group, study last year’s keyword performance, click-through rates, conversion rates and cost per click. This will give you a baseline on which to measure this year’s campaigns.
For each of your highest performing keywords, consider adding an add group with the words “holiday”, “Christmas”, “seasonal”, “Hanukkah”, or the like, to capitalize shoppers looking for holiday-oriented products. Since these phrases are likely long-tail keywords, optimizing a landing page for these phrases may help you rank naturally for them, too. Say the keyword you normally bid on is “shirts”. Your holiday campaign, then, would be filled with keywords like: “holiday shirts”, “Christmas shirts”, etc. Make sure you exclude those holiday keywords from your other ad groups, however, so that your holiday campaign will take all of your holiday ad juice. Remember to tailor a landing page just for the holidays for these customers.
Check your competitor’s ads. Have they lowered shipping costs or offered a free gift with purchase? If so, you may want to think about competing with these promotions.
Update your ads to reflect your most current promotions. While planning your promotions for the holidays, don’t forget to reflect them in your PPC ad text. Also, don’t be afraid to use holiday terms in your ads to convey the holiday spirit.
Are you overbidding on keywords? Now is the time to test. Believe it or not, Labor Day is the first unofficial start of the holiday season (the second unofficial start is Halloween). Start testing keyword prices to get optimal click-through and cost per click. How? Start by lowering your bid price per keyword by $.10. Let that ad run for a day, or week, and measure whether or not you get an acceptable amount of conversions/click-through. Keep doing this until you have bid as low as possible while getting optimal conversions.

Adding Fresh Content to Your Ecommerce Website

Tue, 17 Aug 2010 10:36:48 -0400

Now is the time to add fresh content to your ecommerce site. Long before holiday shoppers flood the Web in search for "the right gift," you can take measures and improve the chance that they'll find your online shop.

Search Engines, Fresh Content
It's a fact: fresh content on your website can boost the frequency of search engine visits. If you're already taking steps to build your Web presence, (paid online marketing services or social media marketing efforts) you can support these initiatives by adding new, unique, valuable content directly to your site well before the holiday rush. Note: Once you've added fresh content to your site, you can easily resubmit your website URL to the top three search engines.

Additional, unique content makes your site more attractive to search engines and helps your standing as a more valued resource in your industry. But what kind of content should you include?

An obvious place to start is with product descriptions. If your online store doesn't already answer every possible question a customer might have about your products, now is the time to fix that. You don't have to be "salesy" about it and wax on about how your tomato chopper is the "best ever." Just provide information. People like to know exactly what they're paying for.

Original Product Descriptions

And while you're at it, keep in mind the following two guidelines so your product descriptions can engage customers and count as SEO friendly fresh content:

When your product description is identical to the description on ten other sites, customers will wonder why they should shop with you and not someone else. So don't use copy from product manufacturers. Your original product descriptions, even if they're not super slick marketing copy, are better.
When you have similar products, do more than just change a word or two in your product descriptions. So if you sell blue shoes and red shoes that are otherwise the same shoe, write a unique description for each. This combats SEO filtering and helps your customers.

Product Guides
Another approach related to product descriptions is how-to guides. You can create a "Guides" page, or you can create a separate page for each guide (better). These sub-pages can be linked to Resources, FAQs, Contact and/or Products pages. Each page should have its own heading, such as, What to Look for in a Replacement Window.

Good Pages
Beyond products, you can focus on other essential areas of the buyer experience. If, for example, you don't yet have some of the following pages, now is a good time to add them:

About Us - Introduce yourself to your customers. If you have this page, make sure the information is up to date.
Contact Us - A separate contact page lets you add unique content and lets your customers know exactly where and how they can find you. If you already have a contact page, look it over for errors or outdated information. Write a few call-to-action statements that invite site visitors to feel free to use the use the contact information you provide.
Why Buy from Us - Many ecommerce websites don't have a page that addresses this question, but it can be a great way to both add new content and tell your customers precisely why you are the best resource for whatever it is you sell.
Guarantees - Alleviate any concerns your customers could possibly have about purchasing items from your e-store. Make your customers more comfortable about buying from you by letting them know that it's a risk-free proposition. Be specific (free returns, no questions asked, etc).
FAQs - "Frequently Asked Questions" pages are common. If you have one, take a look at it and give it a tune-up if needed. If there is no FAQs page on your site, take this opportunity to do something that will save time on customer service calls and add new content. Like the Guarantees page, FAQs pages can alleviate fears that might keep your visitors from becoming buyers.
Customer Testimonials - Reassuring and a source your customers are more apt to trust, testimonials present your trustworthiness and value from a third-party perspective. The best testimonials are real ones, of course, and include a first and last name, preferably city and state too. If you have a drawer or computer file folder full of rave reviews, now is the time to post them!
Resources/Links - Let your customers know you are there for them. You can provide expert advice, industry-related information, links to pages about safety or consumer tips, etc.

Themes, Pages, Keywords
Any unique, original content that adds value to your ecommerce site is a good thing, so make the most of it. Keep the following in mind as you enrich your site with your particular brand of marketing genius:

Each page should adhere to a strictly focused theme. This is important because search engines like themes; they'll be quicker to dismiss a rambling page with lots of different types of information all mashed together.
If you have a lot to say on a topic, break it up into sub-themes and have a separate page for each sub-theme. Make sure you include links from one page to the next so it's easy for interested consumers to keep reading.
Make sure visitors can find your new pages. Provide links from your Home page (typically the "hub" of a Website) to important product pages, resources/links, FAQs, or other areas of your website. You can do this with "calls to action." (e.g., "Read our articles on what to look for in quality fishing gear, or just contact us for help selecting the right equipment.")
Incorporate top-performing keywords that relate to your products, but don't overdo it. Whatever content you add should read naturally and primarily be written to serve your readers, not the search engines.
Place a targeted keyword in the title and near the beginning of the first block of text. You can also use synonyms of your keywords. This is good for SEO and for keeping your visitors interested.

Goethe said it best: "Whatever you do, or dream you can, begin it. Boldness has genius and power and magic in it." So, be bold! Act now to add quality content to your website. Do what you can to boost your search engine rankings and build customer confidence long before the first signs of the holidays appear, and you'll be ready to cash in on seasonal consumer spending.

Choose a Merchant Account to Accept Credit Card Payments Online

Fri, 15 Jan 2010 16:50:41 -0500

If the purpose of your ecommerce store is to make money – then you need to make it as easy as possible for your customers to buy your products online. Since we know that most online shoppers prefer credit card transactions – you need to set-up your online store to accept credit card payments over the Web. Sounds simple, right? And yet, there are so many options for you to choose from and not all credit card processing methods are created equal.

Some new ecommerce stores opt to use third party payment solutions like PayPal® for credit card processing, but the benefits are usually outweighed by the shortcomings of this type of solution. Although you will get fraud protection and fast set-up, your customers are transported away from your site to process the credit card transaction, which increases abandonment rates, and you will not capture their customer information on your site. Funds are paid to you via check or direct deposit but can take days to be transferred, and you pay a percentage of each sale for using that type of solution. If you are just starting out and anticipate only extremely low-volume sales, PayPal may work for you, but it has big limitations in helping you grow your online business and encourage customer loyalty and repeat sales.

If you are serious about your ecommerce store and wish to grow your business online, then you need to set up a merchant account for credit card processing. As soon as you start your search for a merchant account, you're sure to be bombarded with offers and the process can be overwhelming. But, before you are persuaded by seemingly implausible low rates – bear in mind that there are many factors you should consider before choosing a merchant account for your credit card processing needs.

Hidden Fees

Beware any merchant account provider that wants to charge an application processing fee or set-up fee. Look for other "hidden fees" that may be lurking in the fine print of your agreement. The acceptable merchant account fees that you can expect include:

Statement fee – an ongoing monthly charge to cover credit card processing costs each month
Discount rate – this is the percent of each sale that is given to the merchant account provider
Transaction fee – a set charge for each credit card transaction that is separate to the discount rate and is not dependant on the value of the sale

Make sure you check for other additional fees such as the charge for refunds. Good rates are important, but they are only a part of the merchant account selection process.

Flexibility

Low rates mean nothing if they restrict the growth of your online business. You need to choose a merchant account provider based on your anticipated sales volume, and make sure there is room for flexibility to process more sales in the event of an online promotion or dramatic increase in product demand. Make sure your merchant account fees are not tied to inflexible policies linked with low monthly limits or lock-in agreements. Also look at the hidden costs of exceeding your monthly limits and find out how flexible your merchant account provider is if you need to increase your credit card processing capabilities to meet new business growth.

Customer Support

Customer service is one of the most important elements to consider when choosing a merchant account. Completing the sales transaction online is at the core of your business – so you want to make sure that if any hiccups occur in this process, you can reach your merchant account provider. It's not helpful to have low fees if something goes wrong and you can't get hold of someone for immediate resolution. Your revenue is dependent on credit card processing, so make sure that you can reach someone when your needs change or something happens that is hampering your ability to accept credit card payments online.

Technical Capabilities

Look at how easy it is to set-up the merchant account and make sure it can be seamlessly integrated with your existing shopping cart software. Does your merchant account provider offer integration with QuickBooks® to make accounting easier? Can they support multiple users and credit card transactions at the same time? Review the methods of credit card processing and make sure it is flexible to meet your requirements – from individual real-time complete automation to end of day batch credit card processing. Also consider any additional merchant account features that you may need such as international capabilities or the ability to store customer information when you accept credit card payments.

Reputation and Guarantee

Choose a merchant account provider that has a proven track record and can demonstrate competence and reliability. How long have they been in business? How many complaints have they received? Make sure you investigate the reliability of service and guarantee for 24/7 credit card processing. Ask how they monitor and respond to complaints and choose a merchant account provider whose credit card processing service package (and not just low rates) fits your business' needs.

Remember – your merchant account provider will be a long-term partner for your business' online success. When choosing a merchant account, you need to find a provider that can integrate with your existing ecommerce shopping cart software. This merchant account provider should also provide strong customer service, a solid and proven reputation and competitive rates. Ensuring long-term service that meets demand is more valuable than a few weeks at a highly discounted rate.

Accept Credit Card Payments Online to Boost Sales

Fri, 15 Jan 2010 16:46:02 -0500

As online stores look for ways to compete in an environment that is facing new challenges from an ever-growing crop of competitors and a struggling economy, online payment options should be regarded as a way to boost business. Currently, only 17% of businesses offer the ability for their customers to pay for products or services online, but that number is expected to double in upcoming years*.

Benefits of a Merchant Account

If your business does not allow customers to pay for your products or services online, you are needlessly turning away business. And when you consider that credit card payments are the method of choice in today’s online arena, it’s clear that you must take steps to enable credit card transactions on your website. With a merchant account, you can:

Offer customers convenience. Your customer’s don’t have time to waste with a lengthy check-out process. Credit card transactions offer them the speed and they desire when shopping online.
Enhance your brand image. When customers see that you went the extra mile to establish a merchant account to accept credit card payments, they are likely to view your business as stable and legitimate.
Ease your own worries. Credit card transactions offer benefits for the business owner too. By using a merchant account for credit card processing, you’ll be able to verify account information and, in turn, receive prompt payment.
Boost sales. When credit card transactions are allowed, customers are more likely to complete purchases – and even purchase more – than they would if using other payment methods.

How to Begin Credit Card Processing

Once you set up a merchant account with a reliable provider, you will need to choose a payment gateway, which connects your merchant account to the transaction clearinghouse. Real-time gateways are best for large-volume inventory, but first you’ll need to make sure that it is compatible with your ecommerce shopping cart software. Network Solutions advanced shopping cart software works in harmony with the majority of gateways.

*The Small Business Success Index, an ongoing measurement of the overall health of U.S. small businesses, was comissioned by Network Solutions, LLC and the University of Maryland's Robert H. Smith School of Business. To take the survey yourself, click here.

What is Online Commerce?

Fri, 15 Jan 2010 15:08:15 -0500

Online commerce involves multiple transactions or the transfer of payment information across a secure Internet connection in exchange for goods and services. Commercial ecommerce represents trade, commercialism, mercantilism and all other business transactions for business, personal or commercial activities that has the sole objective of supplying commodities via an online storefront.

Ecommerce is governed by the Department of Commerce, created in 1913, is the federal organization with the United States that promotes and administers domestic and foreign trade. The DOC monitors B2B and B2C ecommerce dealings both online and off-line. It covers a broad range of markets from consumer based retail sites, auctions and peer-to-peer sites, to business exchanges negotiating commodities between corporations. These organizations help to regulate ecommerce operations and corresponding business rules.

Ecommerce Explained
Online selling enables small business entrepreneurs to electronically commercialize products with no barriers of time or distance. ASP shopping cart web stores have expanded rapidly over the past five years and is predicted to accelerate. In the near future, ecommerce will mean that the boundaries between "conventional" and "ebusiness software" marketplaces will become increasingly blurred as more e-businesses transact portions of their industry operations and merchandise to web shops or online malls or marts.

B2B refers to ecommerce between businesses rather than between a business and a consumer. B2B businesses often deal with hundreds or even thousands of other businesses, either as customers or suppliers. Carrying out these transactions electronically provides vast competitive advantages over traditional methods. When implemented properly, Ecommerce is often faster, cheaper and more convenient than the traditional methods of bartering goods and services. Much research has gone into the creation of such a powerfully connected online sales environment.

Ecommerce has penetrated markets for quite some time in the form of E Data Interchange. EDI requires each supplier and customer to set up a dedicated data link, which provides a cost-effective method for companies to set up multiple, ad-hoc links. This development has lead to the emergence of marketplaces where suppliers and potential customers are brought together to conduct mutually beneficial trade.

How will you turn your email and webstore into a technology procurement center? Don't be fooled... conducting effective e-business is more than registering a domain name and secure ecommerce web hosting.

Network Solutions offers a free shopping cart demo to provide your enterprise a solid foundation and the building blocks for online success.

Shopping cart software is an operating system used to to post your sales outlet on the web, allowing your customers to browse your shop, stock your showcase with retail or wholesale stock, track customers, control inventory, and tie together all aspects of ecommerce into one cohesive whole.

While there are many types of software you can use, customizable, turnkey shopping basket solutions are proven to be a cost effective method to build, edit and maintain database driven online business.

Shopping Carts

Fri, 15 Jan 2010 15:04:50 -0500

The center of an ecommerce online store is the shopping cart. Shopping basket, online shopping cart, web store, e catalog and shopping carts are appropriate metaphors of the familiar trolley used in supermarkets. People go to supermarkets, push shopping carts through the aisles, pick and choose the items needed. They add and remove items from the carts without much effort or thought. Shopping cart software is an effort to translate the ease and control over purchasing in the real world (to which people are so accustomed), to the electronic world of online shopping. It is essentially an extension of a simple order form. A simple order form is generally limited in the amount of interactivity it gives to the customer, and allows a limited number of products and options.

There are several different types of ecommerce online shopping cart available, each with their own advantages and disadvantages:

ASP Shopping Cart Software:
(ASP) stands for active server pages the language was written by Microsoft and provides a robust ecommerce platform. ASP Shopping Carts are easy to build edit and manage. The MonsterCommerce shopping cart software is written in ASP and provides an easy to use "back-office" to manage all components of your e-business.

CGI Shopping Cart:
The major advantage is that they are supported by all of the major browsers. The disadvantage is they can be hard to set-up and maintain, can be slow, and waste bandwidth and system resources.

Cookie Shopping Cart:
These types of ecommerce carts are easy to setup and maintain. They are faster than traditional CGI shopping cart and use less bandwidth and system resources. The disadvantage is they are not supported by browsers that do not support cookies, and become ineffective in cases where the user chooses to turn off cookies in their browsers.

Java Shopping Cart:
The advantages are that they can have a content rich and visually pleasing interface (and not limited by HTML). The limitations of this shopping cart software are that since you have to build your store inside the applet, they are hard to customize and can be slow.

JavaScript Shopping Cart:
The advantages are that they are fast, easy to set-up and maintain, easy to customize, save bandwidth, and save system resources. The disadvantage is they are not supported by browsers that do not support cookies and JavaScript. Furthermore, it can be difficult to set-up large shopping carts by this approach.

Have time to spare? Visit a web page dedicated to shopping cart abuse.

The question, then, you will have to ask yourself is: do I need shopping cart software tools that come equipped with a turnkey shopping cart? For a small number of products with few options, a full-fledged shopping cart might not be necessary. In such as case, a smaller customized page that accepts credit cards may be sufficient. If you have a large number of products with many variations and options, it may be inconvenient to include them all in a single page. In such a case, it is preferable to display the shopping cart products over a variety of pages, which would include a navigation system for customers to move around, select items as needed (and remove items), and ultimately, will be able to checkout. This would require state persistence from page to page, and thus an actual full-fledged shopping cart solution.

It is recommended that you choose the ecommerce store software based on features needed along with the number of products contained within your shopping cart.

Ecommerce Software

Fri, 15 Jan 2010 14:58:46 -0500

Ecommerce solutions are your next focus. By now, you should have an idea of what products you want to sell, what type of shopping cart needs to be built, and what ecommerce software you will need to be efficient. Ideally, you should find software that is compatible with all of the features you want to encompass from credit card merchant account services to logo design.

At this point, you should make a list ranking which features are most important so you can choose the best ecommerce solution. In a perfect world, you will find a program that can meet all of your business needs. Planning ahead and being flexible will make finding the right ecommerce package a breeze, and should make for a successful future.

You have three simple options to choose from when selecting an ecommerce shopping cart software:

Buy a ready made solution (turnkey shopping cart software)
Rent space on a network
Build an online store system from scratch

Turnkey Shopping Cart Software
Buying a ready made solution that matches your specifications and requirements will give you a standardized set of features while supplying you with additional plug ins. If you find a model that closely matches what you need, buy it. Keep in mind though, that it may be a good solution for you now, but if you plan to expand, it may not fit your needs in the future. Trying to add new features to an existing pre bought package could mean custom programming and software training that can be time consuming and very inefficient. Be sure to keep this in mind when researching this type of ecommerce solution. Also, plug-ins mean more money. Be aware that adding additional software features can mean additional work, time and money. Rank your priorities and see if this type of shopping cart will be the best avenue to take.

Renting space on an ecommerce based network is usually inexpensive and can include many common and needed features. This solution is usually one of the quicker options because they are all web based and you do not have to install anything yourself. You basically just sign up, configure some settings, and upload your product information. It is an instant storefront solution. With this in mind, you may not get all of the features you are looking for and you may be limited as to how you run your operations. If there is a perfect match in what you need and what is provided, the solution will be great. Otherwise, you will end up searching for a new provider in the near future.

Building a solution to exactly fit your specifications will obviously meet your requirements to a tee. It will, however, require expertise, time, and a hefty budget, to create exactly what you are looking for. The advantage of this system is that you can custom build your shopping cart program to give you a competitive edge and unique place in the market. This is beneficial if you plan to make changes frequently and want to offer specials to customers on your own time. Usually, you can create these types of storefronts and databases in any programming language, including Perl, PHP, ASP, C++ and ColdFusion developing environments. When taking this approach, the database will have to be designed from scratch and integrated into the store along with modules to support tax, shipping and payment processing software. If you are not comfortable creating applications on this level, this solution might not be the best for you. Again, analyze your business model as a whole and choose a solution that is right for you and your company.