Shopping Cart Review latest articles

An In Depth Look at Pinnacle Cart

Mon, 05 Dec 2005 00:00:00 GMT

Pinnacle Cart is a PHP shopping cart made by Desert Dog Software in the USA. A while ago, I had a chance to have a good look at Pinnacle Cart in version 3.30. Pinnacle Cart have released a few versions and I had another look at their latest version, 3.6.0. Some of the new features in the last few versions include:

One page checkout
Product zoom/magnify
Gift certificates
Layered navigation
Wish list
Plug-in system allowing developers to create plug-ins without affecting upgrades (a problem that plagues many competitive products)
New easier templating system
"Customers who bought "x" also bought these products"

Pinnacle provide a more detailed list on their site.

The overall focus of the product is on running the business. The saying “run your shop, not your shopping cart” is very true, and Pinnacle Cart make it easy to do this.

Initial Impressions

Logging into the admin screen for the first time was a good experience. As a shop owner you are going to be spending a lot of time here, and it's nice to look clean. All functions are clearly accessibly and labelled, and there is a nice summary screen of month sales statistics, recent orders and recent users in your face. I could see some of those functions become very addictive to see update.

Admininstration home page

The default skin on the public facing shopping cart is functional and clean. While it won’t win any design awards (and a default skin probably shouldn’t), it is well thought out. Updating the skin is impressively easy to do as we’ll see later. The default settings as to which modules are shown are sensible.

Setting up & Managing Products

Let's put some stock in our shop. First thing we want to do is create some categories. Creating categories & sub categories is very straight forward & intuitive, and has nice touches such as when a category is created it takes you to a screen with a list of the tasks you are likely to want to do next. Attention to detail like this does make it nice to use, and saves a lot of on going frustration when you are creating the 20^th category that day. By default, the categories are created as a tree view menu.

Creating a product is a nice experience. While there are a large number of options for the categories, it's set up so that the main options (price, category, name, description, etc) are immediately accessible while other less common options such as quantity discounts are easy to get to but not right in your face. Sensible promotional features such as "Show Product on Homepage" are easily accessible. While this is far from a unique feature, it is sensibly laid out, easy to find and to understand.

A particularly impressive feature is the ability to manage inventory at an attribute level. This is one of these features that tends to frustrate people no end. Most shopping carts manage inventory at a product level – you have an item, and you have a stock level. Most shopping carts also allow attributes, e.g., you can define whether you want your jeans in blue or green, large or small, etc. However, with most carts, there is only one lot of inventory. You have 10 pairs of jeans in stock, but the shopping cart has no awareness that you have 5 small and 5 large. This is one of those things that non-techies often assume, as from a business perspective it seems obvious. Technically it’s relatively challenging. Kudos to Pinnacle for including this.

Product attributes have additional flexibility. For example you could easily create a drop down box which allows the user to choose between red and green, where the green option is $5 cheaper and only half as heavy as the red. It's also possible to automatically assign a particular attribute across an entire category, a big time saver for some people.

You can turn on a product navigation feature. As well as the more normal "click on this image to show full size", the user can move their mouse over the image and see a section magnified. Nice!

Image magnify function

There is also the ability to support digital products. There's more about advanced product features in the marketing tools section below.

Payment, Shipping & Taxes

Out of the box, Pinnacle has a good range of payment gateways. I enabled a few gateways I have accounts with, and integration seemed to be very good & appropriately customized to suit each gateway.

The shipping supports a range of options. As well as having great support for real time shipping calculations for UPS, USPS, FedEx and Canada post, it allows you to create custom shipping options. These can be based on price, weight, quantity, flat rate, or pretty much any combination of the above. I wanted to be able to create flat rate shipping with the customer able to choose a "regular" or "express" price, and had it up and running in under a minute.

Taxes allows you to define taxes per country, or for the USA, per state. There didn't appear to be a way to include taxes into the item cost, which is the practice in most countries outside of the USA, so some of those visitors who are accustomed to tax being included might get a shock at the checkout.

Layered navigation

There is a new feature called layered navigation. This allows you to define price points that users can limit their searches by. For example, a user could look at a category, and have the option to restrict the display to items at $0 - $19.99, $20 - $49.99 or $50 - $100.

Layered navigation

Checking Out

An important part of a shopping cart is the check out process. Some studies have shown that out of people who want to buy, and for who money is no object can have a 70% failure rate simply because they can't work out how to buy.

Pinnacle Cart has two options. One is a fairly conventional multi-step checkout. The exact steps will vary depending on shipping methods and payment gateways selected, but will be similar for most combinations. I would like to see a clear indication of what steps are remaining. If this is step 2 of 4, tell the customer that, don't keep them guessing how much longer they have. The ability to be able to checkout without registering is a great feature as well.

The other checkout option, at the choice of the administrator, is their new “one page checkout” which is exactly what the name says. It does use some AJAX techniques to keep things moving along, but it basically is as simple as it sounds – the checkout really is one page. I’d love to know the experiences of people using the standard checkout who then switched to one page checkout, and how it impacted their conversions, but I’d suspect at worst it would be break even, and may well improve conversions.

Skinning

Pinnacle Cart has an impressive collection of tools to edit the skin without having to dive into code. If you want to simply change the colors of the default skin, there are several color combinations built in. Changing these default colors is easy and requires no coding. As an example of the flexibility, I was looking at the product page thinking I didn’t especially like the layout and how I would have to customize it. Then I thought to check the backend, and found an option to choose between several product page layouts, one of which was almost exactly what I wanted. What a joy!

Default skin

In direct contrast to most software out there, Pinnacle Cart actively avoids getting you to make HTML templates, CSS, and so on to make skins. Almost everything is available via the admin interface. While it might not be infinitely flexible, it’s pretty good. For the pragmatic shop owner, there’s no reason they couldn’t have a good looking shop up and running in a short amount of time with some minimal input from a skilled graphic designer (for color schemes, images, etc). The fussy purist will probably still need to dive into some code (which can be done). Their demo store shows there is a fair degree of flexibility.

Marketing Tools

As you would expect for a cart whose focus is marketers, Pinnacle Cart has a wide range of marketing tools.

Product Features

There are some marketing tools which are product centric. I was impressed with the "product promotions" feature. It allows you very simply to set up rules such as "if a customer buys 2 or more of product X, they get product Y for free". There is also very flexible quantity discount rules & product recommendations. The product recommendations are interesting as they operate on groups of products. You associate a few products you wish to recommend to a group, and then associate the group to the product. This is great if you want to promote the same products in several locations, but a slight nuisance if you want to choose different cross sell products for each product.

Discounts

There is a feature to create a promotional code. This allows you to create rules such as "when a customer enters this code, they get $5 off the order if it's over $20 and before December 24th". There doesn't seem to be an ability to limit the code to a certain numbers of uses, e.g., only available for the first 100 customers. Other features such as percentage off, free shipping offers, etc, would have been nice.

There’s also a report allowing you to see which promo codes have been used, the order size, discounts, etc. I’d love to see a way of telling how many were new customers, but that’s being a little fussy.

There is also a sale mode which allows you to set a sale across all products.

Emails

Pinnacle Cart distinguishes between two types of email communications. One is a "newsletter" and the other is a "product update". Customers can choose to sign up to either one or both of them. The newsletter is pretty much what you'd expect - simply a newsletter containing freeform HTML (or text).

The product update is a nice feature I haven't seen before. It allows you to send an email containing all products updated in a particular date range (eg. the last month). For people with a very passionate customer base this is a great way to keep them in touch with the latest products.

There's a good range of email management tools - import subscribers, export subscribers, styles, etc. It should suit the needs of any small business and many medium businesses well.

Search Engines

For many online shops, search engines are their life blood. Good search engine support is critical to the success of many online shops. While the default URLs of Pinnacle aren't very search engine friendly, it can easily be switched into friendly mode which is have “nice” looking URLs such as:
http://yourshop.com/review/catalog/Mac-2-1.html

The support for meta data and sensible title tags (which most search engines love) was reasonably good. There was also nice touches such as product names on their pages appearing in <h1> tags (which some search engines see as a vote for that text being more important). These small things add up and can bump you up a place or two in Google.

Other Marketing Tools

Pinnacle cart will create files for you in an appropriate format for Froogle or Altura. It also supports a 3rd party affiliates program. However, there are no built in affiliates features.

Reporting

I confess: I'm a reporting addict. I spend hours pouring over reports, I think there's gold (almost literally in the case of e-commerce) in getting & acting on quality reports. I'll let Pinnacle Cart speak for itself on the reports it has:

Top Viewed Products - List the top viewed products.
Top Viewed Categories - List the top viewed categories.
Orders by Products - Lists the top products purchased. Includes number of items sold and subtotal amounts for each product
Users Activity Report - Lists over number of pages viewed by registered users.
Top Referring Sites - Lists the top refering URLs to the site
Sales by Customer - This report shows overall purchase statistics by customer.
Payment Types - Shows purchase statistics by payment type.
Consolidated Orders By Date - This report shows overall statistics by dates from selected period. It includes subtotal, tax, shipping, discount, and total amounts for each day.
Individual Orders By Date - This report shows overall statistics by completed orders with received payment. It includes subtotal, tax, shipping, discount, and total amounts for orders.
Promo Codes Usage
Total Tax

All reports are available by any date range, and are as advertised. Combined with a decent web analytics package (or the free Google Analytics) it should be enough to keep the most reports addicts happy.

Extensibility

There is a plug-in architecture, it includes a "product feed" plug-in pre-installed which allows you to import product information from selected wholesalers or drop shippers. One nice feature is an included Google sitemap generator. It would be nice to see this dynamically generated so that you didn’t need to redo the sitemap every time you added products.

Support

The software comes with an extensive manual. The manual is well written, but like most software manuals focuses on each individual feature. This is more a critique of the software industry in general rather than Pinnacle Cart, but I'd like to see more documentation focused on how to do things. Feature based documentation generally assumes you know what feature to use to accomplish a particular task, you just aren't sure how that feature works. However, as far as feature based help goes, it's thorough and clear.

In addition to the manual, there is free 30 day phone and 12 months email support, as well as a support ticketing system and a knowledge base with a few dozen items in it. There is a support forum which seems to be fairly active and developing a great community. I did encounter several minor bugs during my tests, but none were show stoppers. There are also options for upgraded paid support.

Other Features

There are many feature I haven't touched on. There is a database management page, order management features and a little touch I really liked, a function which allows you to export your orders to Quick Books format for record keeping. Touches like this make life simpler for the small business person.

There is also a very simple content management function which allows you to create an unlimited number of pages. Optionally, those pages can be automatically be linked to in the header and/or footer - great for privacy policies, etc.

Conclusion

Pinnacle Cart is definitely has a great balance between power and ease of use. While I wouldn't ask my mother to set up an online shop using this software, I think any reasonably computer proficient non-programmer could set up a shop without too many problems. There's a real attention to detail in a lot of the features which really impressed me. There are a few features missing (such as product reviews), but most major functions are there. While it's not the cheapest shopping cart software on the market, I would be pretty confident you could set this software up faster than most other packages available, and using some of its more advanced marketing features a competent marketer could produce higher sales. I didn't get a chance to dive deep into the code to see how customizable it is, but they do have a good developer network in place to do custom upgrades if required. Overall, a great product to get your online business off to a good start.

Please note: a detailed review like this takes substantial amounts of time. As a result, the cost of time was partially offset by a payment from the makers of Pinnacle. At no time did they put any pressure on me, there was no incentives of future work or other kick backs, and payment was received before they saw the review. They thoroughly respect and value the independent nature of this site.

Should I buy or rent my shopping cart?

Sat, 24 Mar 2007 06:01:18 GMT

There are two types of shopping carts. One type you pay a monthly fee to a company who host the shopping cart for you. These are called rented, hosted, or managed shopping carts. The other type is a shopping cart you buy (or some are free) and install it on a web server you have organised yourself. Some shopping carts have an option to buy or rent. This article compares the two types and helps you choose.

Rented shopping carts

These carts have a monthly fee and sometimes additional fees such as a percentage of each sale. There are normally a few price points depending on the number of products you have, number of visitors you are expecting or the features available.
Rented carts:

are quick to setup
require little to no technical skill
include web hosting
look after details such as server backups, etc.

They also:

often have high monthly fees
are often hard to customise if you have a specific need

Downloaded shopping carts

You can also download a shopping cart and install it on a web server. It's easy and fairly cheap to rent some web space, but will normally require at least some very basic technical knowledge to install it. Many shopping cart providers will install it for you for a small fee. Prices to buy a cart vary but most are under $1,000, this is a once-only cost. There are some free carts, although these may not be the best choice for you. Many shopping carts allow an almost infinite amount of customisation, but this usually requires a programmer which can get expensive if you want complex customisations.
Downloaded shopping carts are:

usually cheaper in the long term
more customisable
offer greater flexibility

They also:

can have higher upfront costs
require some basic technical knowledge to get started
have monthly web hosting costs

What should I choose?

As always, there's no easy answer. If you are working with a web design company, they will usually choose a downloaded shopping cart. This is because downloaded carts are usually more flexible. If you have some basic technical knowledge, or can hire someone who does, a downloaded shopping cart will probably work out cheaper. If you get stuck or mess things up, all shopping carts have people available who can help you out - at a cost of course.
Busy people who want to do it all themselves usually choose a rented cart. They tend to be less hassle in the short term and can get up and running very quickly. The ongoing fees can add up quickly.

AmeriCommerce Review

Sun, 23 Dec 2007 22:38:46 GMT

Having been through the search of a shopping cart solution in the past, I valued input about different solutions, especially from other storeowners who had used the product. I have since starting out changed my solution provider once and I am now using AmeriCommerce. I manage two websites on the AmeriCommerce platform: Pippin McGee – a children’s furniture store since Feb 2007 and Om Village – a metaphysical and healing art store which I moved over to AmeriCommerce in Nov 2007.

After having used it for 9-10 months now, I believe I have found a product that meets my long-term business needs and I’d like to share my experience and describe some of the features in some depth. I hope this article gives you some insight into the solution from a user perspective to gauge if this solution might meet your business needs.

Installation/Start Up process

AmeriCommerce offered a 14 day free trial (without a credit card) and that helped me jump into the backend and review the features. Once I found it had all the core features I needed I talked with them about some features we needed custom developed and they were the only ecommerce solution providers willing to do custom feature development. The sign up and startup process was simple.

Design/Customizing/One Page Checkout - usability factors

Control over 95% of the design elements. If you know HTML, CSS and basic JavaScript – you can go anywhere you like with your design. If you don’t, you can still have a very professional looking website.

The part I found most useful was on the product details page, I could customize the elements from a usability and conversion perspective. I was able to add the right hand side column with a ‘may we help you’ section so the buyer has immediate access to it and can get questions answered right away.

Another feature which is key to our success is the ability to display high resolution product images. We sell children’s furniture and it is important for our customers to be able to see the furniture in great detail. Scene7 can be prohibitive at $10,000 a year (at the time of our inquiry) for small businesses. Having the ability to display hi-res images integrated into the standard solution has been a huge saving!

To visually see the above mentioned features (may we help you, zooming into a hi-res image) take a look at our Lea Furniture, loft bed page.

One page checkout is built in and a good usability and conversion standard. This feature is not unique to AmeriCommerce. It’s a standard. They offer easy integration with Paypal as an alternate checkout option. Google checkout is not yet integrated, but in the works and should be rolled out shortly. This is a key feature and I would have liked to have seen it rolled out sooner.

Product Management

AmeriCommerce has both, a simple but detailed manual product management interface and a very detailed spreadsheet. This once again, is standard in many shopping carts. The part I have not seen on some of the other carts but find very useful in AmeriCommerce is:

‘Live Design’ – when I’m logged in and browsing my website, if I need to change something out quickly, I can edit the category, manufacturer, product details right from there with the click of a button.
Mass Editor with filtering options – although mass product editing is not uncommon, AmeriCommerce allows filtering of products by category, subcategory and manufacturer. Any time a manufacturer changes product pricing, shipping time etc – having the manufacturer filter is extremely useful in quick product updates.

There are several ways to mass edit products with spreadsheets, but it is helpful to have a very user-friendly interface for quick edits and also to train non-technical and customer service staff to use this interface for quick edits.

SEO

Very SEO friendly. Provides for meta tags, page titles, custom URLs for all pages (category, sub-category, product details, manufacturer and content pages), 301 redirects, and extremely easy to add content to all the pages.

On our category pages for Yoga Art and Meditation Art we used meta titles, descriptions, custom URLs, custom headings, content for on page optimization and had excellent results with on page optimization.

Marketing

Affiliate systems, auto submissions to Google Base feed, yahoo shopping and Shopzilla, on site banners. I have only used the Google Base feed to date. AmeriCommerce offers the ability to pick up descriptions of the products from different fields giving us some data feed optimization control. This has worked very well for us allowing us to pickup good traffic from Google’s product searches.

Another feature worth looking at is the ‘Add to Cart’ Link Generator – this allows us to generate code for ‘Add to Cart’ buttons for any product of our choice. We are working on a campaign to directly insert these ‘Add to Cart’ buttons in our emails. This allows a customer to add the product directly into the shopping cart from the email. Works very well for ‘Impulse’ buy products.

Reporting/Abandoned Carts/Path Logging

Great reporting – every session is logged and you can get into the backend and see the exact path a visitor followed and at what point they left the site. I have found this extremely useful.

If I have an abandoned cart, I can dig deeper to see if it may be a ‘window shopper’ who didn’t go to the checkout page or if it was a visitor that went to the checkout page but after that went to the shipping or returns page and bailed out at that point. It is very interesting and useful to study the visitor paths and helps us further optimize the conversion path.

Also, if a visitor had started to checkout and left information on the page – it gets logged and we have followed up with the customer to close those sales almost 95% of the time.

Support/Knowledgebase (Product tutorials and videos)

The tutorials and FAQs cover all of the features and the back end user interface is well categorized and structured. Intuitive and very easy to use.

They don’t offer 24/7 telephone support. Having said that, I haven’t had to reach them outside of business hours. Their system and hosting has been stable and is monitored. On occasion when I have needed to speak with someone during business hours, I have found them to be very helpful.

Being a visual learner, I personally like videos and learning through videos. AmeriCommerce doesn’t offer videos as yet. Although I don’t have use for it anymore, it would be a valuable addition to someone new to the system (assuming they like to learn visually). I have to admit AmeriCommerce has asked for feedback on this from customers and I missed responding and giving my input.

Video tutorials and training is the only area I could really find a marginal downside with AmeriCommerce. However, they do make up for it with a very responsive support ticket system. Their technical support team is very knowledgeable and quick to respond.

Custom Development

This was a key factor in our decision to choose AmeriCommerce. Their willingness to custom develop features helps us have a solution partner over just a solution provider. They have a ‘development share’ program where AmeriCommerce shares half the cost of development, the remaining half can be covered by the storeowner requesting the feature or put out a request to other storeowners. If other storeowners are interested in having the feature developed, then the costs are shared. Once a feature is custom developed for the storeowners requesting the feature, it is rolled out to all the stores and every customer benefits. It’s a great business and community model that benefits all storeowners.

In Conclusion

The above list of features touched upon are features we have found useful for our sites. The list is certainly not complete and is always growing – for a detailed and updated list, it would be best to review the feature list at AmeriCommerce’s website.

As with any software and company, there is always room for growth. More so, in a dynamic and fast changing online and technology environment. The key really lies in defining mid to long term business needs and reviewing solution providers/partners based on that.

Manjula Higginbotham, Ecommerce Manager (www.omvillage.com and www.pippinmcgee.com)

Setting Prices in your Zen Cart

Sat, 28 Jul 2007 04:31:33 GMT

That Software Guy
© 2007 All Rights Reserved

If you sell - or want to sell - products on the Internet, you already know about the importance of selecting the right discounting strategy. What you may not be aware of are all the many ways of implementing a discounting strategy in Zen Cart™, a popular open-source shopping cart program. We'll look at some of the approaches you can take, using both built-in facilities from the cart's stock distribution and third-party add-ons called "contributions."

Discounting Philosophies

Before we get into specific discounting mechanisms, let's spend some time thinking about when and why a discounting program might make sense.

Clearly discounting is closely tied to pricing, and a pricing strategy which trims margins to the bone may not be compatible with discounting. In fact, margin erosion is a classic objection to discounting - but it need not be an obstacle.

What if you only discounted your higher margin items?
What if you discounted lower margin items only when purchased along with a higher margin items?
What if you only provided discounts to high-value customers?
What if you only discounted sales over a certain dollar threshold?

Rather than thinking about discounts as a reduction in bottom line profitability, discounting can be seen as a way to make sales which might otherwise not have been made at all. Indeed, rather than reducing profits, discounting can be seen as a way to

Encourage customer loyalty
Incent volume purchases
Move unwanted stock
Build goodwill

There is no "best of breed" discounting model; your discounting program should be custom designed to compliment your business plan, your inventory and your sales objectives.

Pricing On the Internet

The chief impediment to discounting in your online store might well be the lack of software support for your desired approach. Assuming your shopping cart permits modifications, you have two options:

Contract a software developer to implement your pricing and discounting policies
Align your policy with what discounting mechanisms that are currently available in your cart

I will focus the remainder of this article on currently available pricing solutions in Zen Cart. Obviously given a sufficiently large budget, any of these could be tweaked and tuned to behave exactly as you wish, but the price of bespoke software is prohibitive for many small merchants.

Visibility of Discounts: In the Cart or At Checkout Time?

Zen Cart has multiple mechanisms for altering the final price of a product. Some of these mechanisms adjust the price directly, and are visible in the cart. Others create a "discount" figure and are not available until checkout time. The latter are called "Order Total" modules, because they affect the order total (rather than the price of any particular item in the order.) Here are two illustrations:

	A product whose price is reduced in the cart (using the Special mechanism discussed below). The display of this price reduction can be set to display by dollars or percentage, or not at all.
	An order whose price is reduced at checkout time via the Group Discount Order Total Module. Discounts are not broken out; a single dollar figure is provided.

Why would you choose to do it at checkout instead of in the cart? Typically this choice is imposed on you based on the design of the discounting package. You must decide on which discounting method makes the most sense for your business first. For instance, do you have a key group of customers that get 20% off everything? Then Group Discounts (an Order Total module) might be a good choice. Would you like to offer pairs of products whose price is reduced if both are purchased? Then look at Better Together. On the other hand, if you just want to discount one item or category for a period of time, then a sale or special is what you want to run, and this will show up in the cart.

In the Cart: Sales and Specials

The two most common in-cart discounting mechanisms are Sales and Specials. They operate similarly, but have different scope: specials are for products, while sales are for categories of products.

A special specifies a new price for a specific product. That price can be a percentage discount off the original price (20%), or a new price ($20.00).

A sale specifies a new price for a one or more categories of products. The price can be a percentage or dollar discount off the original price, or a new price.

Both specials and sales can be constrained to only apply for certain calendar periods.

From a customer's perspective, sales and specials look identical when looking at a single product. Here are the three possible display permutations: displaying the discount as a price discount, displaying the discount as a percentage discount, and not displaying the discount at all. Note that in each case, the original price is displayed with strikethrough.

	Displaying the discount as a percentage off base price
	Displaying the discount as a dollar figure off the base price
	Not displaying the discount

Sales and specials interoperate in a highly configurable manner. Sales can be configured to apply on top of, instead of or only in the absence of specials. Here's an example with a sale on top of a special:

$5.00 off Sale on top of 25% off special

At Checkout Time: Coupons

Ever since Mr. C.W. Post (of Post Cereal) invented the coupon in 1895, coupons have been an important component of retail pricing strategy - as well as a powerful brand and goodwill building mechanism. Zen Cart has a built in coupon feature which permits discounting by a fixed amount or a percentage of the total. Once created, coupons can be restricted to apply to specific products or categories. Coupons use can be restricted on a per customer or global basis if desired, as well as a date range.

At Checkout Time: Group Discounts and Better Together

Group Discounts and Better Together are examples of Order Total Modules, which compute a discount which is shown at checkout time. Group Discounts is built in to Zen Cart; Better Together is an add-on contribution which I wrote.

The concept of group discounting is simple and intuitive - customers are added to discount "groups" and given percentage discounts, possibly including tax and shipping, on their total purchase amounts.

Better Together is more complex, but still familiar to most customers since it is a promotion style that Amazon.com uses. Items are "linked" and a discount is provided when both linked items are purchased. The product detail page for an item promoted by Better Together might contain upselling text such as this:

Buy this item, get a Microsoft Intellimouse Explorer at 50% off

If both items were purchased, the discount would be displayed at checkout time on the final page:

Shopping cart showing Better Together discount

Quantity Discounts - Your Choice

Quantity Discounting is a time-tested mechanism to generate larger volume sales. The approach is simple: buying in volume lowers the unit price.

Zen Cart has two Quantity Discounting mechamisms: a built in one, which appears in the cart, and a third-party contribution, which operates as an Order Total module.

Zen Cart's Quantity Discount feature	That Software Guy's Quantity Discount Contribution
Only allows per-product quantity discounts	Allows you to discount by item, by parent category or by all items in the cart
Must be configured for every product on which you want to offer quantity discounts	Quantity Discounts Contribution applies to all products (except those you specifically exempt)
Allows unlimited numbers of discount levels, but discounts must be individually configured on each product	Allows only five discount levels, but discounting is applied to all products except where specified
Marketing text is fixed, automatically generated	Marketing text may be customized to your needs, but must be added manually

Determining the Right Strategy

In conclusion, a great number of discounting mechanisms are available in Zen Cart. Determining which ones are the best match for your business will depend on your marketing mix. Discounting can not only improve the bottom line, but can also have the effect of building goodwill and increasing the stickiness of your brand. Best practices in discounting are to test various strategies, measure their effectiveness, and adjust as needed.

What is a payment gateway?

Sat, 24 Mar 2007 06:04:41 GMT

What is a payment gateway?

Most ecommerce sites want to accept credit cards. To accept credit cards online you need two components. One is a merchant account, usually with a bank. This allows you to accept credit cards, online or otherwise. The other piece is a payment gateway. This is an online service that connects you website with your merchant account to process the payment. The payment gateway is the link between your website and your bank.
There are also "integrated merchant accounts". They have a merchant account and payment gateway integrated into a single service. They are more convenient, but often have high fees.

What will this cost me?

Merchant accounts usually charge a percentage of the transaction. They may also charge:

a setup fee
a monthly or yearly fee
a fixed amount per transaction

Before you shop around, you should know roughly the number of transactions per month and the average value of each transaction. Higher volume will normally give lower fees. Some banks might be reluctant to give a merchant account to a business with no trading history.

Payment gateways have similar fees. Many charge a fixed amount per transaction rather than a percentage. They will often have extra features (sometimes for a cost) such as fraud detection.

How does this integrate with my website?

There's a few ways to integrate with your website. Regardless of how you integrate, your shopping cart will need to support your payment gateway. Most shopping carts support most major payment gateways.

The first method is that the shopping cart lives on your site, and once the customer has filled their basket and is ready to pay, they are sent to a page on the payment gateway site. The shopping cart passes on the total cost and customer details (name, address, etc, if known) to the payment gateway. This is the easiest integration option, but is a jarring experience for the customer to suddenly see a different site at the time of typing in their credit card. This will likely lose you a percentage of your customers. A similar option allows changes to the appearance of the payment gateway's page to look more like your site. Different payment gateways allow different levels of customisation. You may need to know some HTML and CSS to do this.

The last option is to collect the payment on your site, but then use the API of the payment gateway to process the payment. An API is a way computers can talk to each other. When the customer enters their details on your site, your shopping cart then talks in the background to the payment gateway, which in turn tells your shopping cart if the transaction was successful. Your shopping cart responds appropriately depending on how it was programmed.

An In Depth Look at ProductCart

Tue, 09 Jan 2007 03:34:14 GMT

Introduction

ProductCart is an ASP shopping cart made by Early Impact. I've had dealings with Early Impact and have been impressed with their professionalism. A while ago I interviewed Massimo Arrigoni, the CEO of Early Impact. You can read his thoughts on ecommerce. They do two main products. Product Cart is a "standard" shopping cart, and Product Cart Build to Order for customisable products. They also sell several add ons for Product Cart. This review looks at Product Cart with the "Apparel Add-on", an add on designed for selling variations on a product, eg, multiple sizes and/or colors as commonly found in the apparel industry.

Installation

Installation was relatively straight forward. There are two database options, Microsoft Access or SQL Server. I chose Microsoft SQL Server which has a slightly more complex setup, for anyone familiar with SQL Server it's nothing unusual. Overall, the setup was pretty straight forward. Complete technophobes may struggle with it, but anyone who knows how to FTP a file should be ok. Using Microsoft access as a database definitely simplifies things.

As I am using the Apparel Add-on I had to install that after I'd setup ProductCart, that install was very simple.

Initial impressions

The first thing I did was explore the administration interface. The interface is simply and intuitive. I spent a while thinking "I wonder how it handles X", most of the time I could find how to manage that function within seconds. It's not the prettiest administration interface I've seen but it's simple, uncluttered and easy to use.

The administration homepage contains sensible links that you are likely to use regularly such as find a product, find an order, or look at recent sales. General setup such as changing the shop name, preferred currency, etc, are easy to do.

Setting up and managing products

The first step is to create some products. The product interface is simple but offers comprehensive features such as list, wholesale and cost prices, back order of products, ability to have products not for sale, etc. It's this degree of sophistication that impressed me about ProductCart. Context sensitive help is offered throughout. Bulk import and export of products is supported.

Payment, shipping and taxes

It's not the sexiest subject, but this can make or break for a shopping cart. There is a comprehensive collection of supported payment gateways, and many non-credit card options. I set up a payment gateway and an offline payment method easily in 5 minutes. Shipping is straight forward, and I found the handling of taxes especially easy to use.

Checking out

The checkout process is critical - mistakes at this stage cost sales. How does ProductCart stack up? It's not the shortest process, but the importance of few steps is often over rated. The emphasis should be on clear, easy to understand steps and ProductCart does this will. Each step is simple, it is clear where you're at in the process, and a good summary page. One nice feature is the ability to purchase without having to register, this has been implemented cleverly.

One thing I didn't like about the checkout is that it uses the same template as the rest of the shop. You should remove all distractions during the checkout process. Why do you still want to show links to your best selling products when a customer is about to buy? I'm sure this could be modified but it's a pity it's not done by default.

Skinning

ProductCart has a 16 page PDF manual called "Integrating product cart v3 with your web site". I was disappointed to find that the default skin doesn't use valid W3C code. It would be possible to make it W3C compliant, but the effort would be significant.

There is an extension available for Dreamweaver which will apparently add the appropriate ProductCart code to your Dreamweaver page. As this extension isn't available for ProductCart v3 at time of writing I didn't test it. It promises to make the skinning process very simple.

Anyone with a decent knowledge of HTML should be able to make a template easily enough. A basic knowledge of ASP would be helpful but not essential. This gallery of live ProductCart stores gives an idea of the skinning capabilities.

Marketing tools

Marketing tools is an area where ProductCart does well. There is a real depth and maturity in many of the tools, and usability is good.

Product features

Creating multiple images per product with thumbnail, detailed views, etc, is straight forward. It's also easy to configure the homepage with specials, featured items and top sellers.

Discounts

There is a lot of flexibility in creating discount coupons. Fixed price discounts, percentage off and free shipping are all supported. Standard features like number of uses per coupon and expiry date also work. It also supports limiting the coupons in a range of useful ways - minimum amount, restricted to certain products and categories, etc. This allows sophisticated promotions such as "20% off all orders over $50 of brand X during November".

Emails

The newsletter wizard has some of the nicest features I've seen, allowing you to send out targeted emails. For example, you can send to customers who have purchased a particular type of product or to customers who purchased during a certain time frame (a great way to remind old customers of your store). Support for newsletter templates would be nice, as well as a way to automatically add products to a newsletter - almost all newsletters will have featured products and creating these by hand can be time consuming.

Search engines

ProductCart doesn't use what many people would call "Search Engine Friendly URLs". A typical product cart URL looks like:

http://www.yourstore.com/productcart/pc/viewPrd.asp?idcategory=&idproduct=231

Where a search engine friendly URL would be:

http://www.yourstore.com/productcart/pc/yourcategory-yourproductname.html

It's generally accepted in the search engine optimization community that these types of URLs are acceptable to all major search engines and so shouldn't be a problem. Some statistics packages do have troubles reporting on query string based URLs so your mileage may vary. It does support automatic sitemap creation as well as Google sitemap creation and submission, a feature which makes it easier for Google to crawl your site.

Other marketing tools

ProductCart includes a comprehensive set of other marketing tools. Amongst these are:

Gift certificates
Quantity discounts
A reward points program
Wish lists
Affiliates programs
Export to Google Base (formerly Froogle)
Gift wrapping
Gift certificates

Reporting

ProductCart has a respectable range of reports. The sales reports are very thorough, allowing you to view sales reports by multiple methods such as by date, product, payment type, top products, etc. This should be a real boost to the savvy marketer to support a range of business decisions.

There's a range of other basic reports such as orders and customers. One nice report is a drop off report which should help increase conversions. I would have liked to have seen a search report, showing what terms are searched for using the ProductCart search engine.

Extensibility

There is no formal plug-in architecture, no way for end users to write plug-ins. ProductCart is written using ASP with VBScript, and all source code is included. The code is clean and well documented, I found it very easy to follow. I wanted to make a minor change to the image uploading functionality and managed to follow the code easily and make the change quickly. There seem to be no third party add ons. Having said that, the software is quite complete and so there is little need outside of very business specific add ons. Early Impact do make several commercial add ons available for people with specialised needs.

Support

I had to deal with support on two occasions. They have a comprehensive manual, and easy to use knowledge base and a customer forums which gets a little traffic. The link to raise a ticket wasn't buried 5 pages deep as with some sites, and was easy to use. Once submitted, it promised a reply within 1 business day. I got the reply within 24 hours which is particularly impressive as I raised the ticket on Saturday. On Sunday evening we had several emails back and forth and resolved the issue. The support was a breath of fresh air - fast, courteous, no annoying canned answers, and support staff who clearly understood what they were talking about, asked sensible questions and offered reasonable solutions. The problem turned out to be a configuration issue on my web host and not a problem with ProductCart, but they didn't leap straight to the "blame the other guy" as many support teams do, that conclusion was only reached after a thorough investigation of possible ProductCart issues.

Other features

There are lots of little features that while in themselves are not earth shattering are nice to have. These include:

Gift wrapping
Gift registries
Customer helpdesk
Drop ship support
Quantity discounts
Good wholesaler support
Customisable customer fields

And many others. Most of them you probably won't use, but there'll probably be one or two that will be a life saver for you.

Conclusion

ProductCart is an excellent product which is showing it's maturity as a version 3 product. It has a lot of attention to detail and small features which are missing from most other products which are a breath of fresh air to many shop owners. While there is certainly room for improvement, the strong existing features and excellent support make this a cart that belongs on most people's short list.

Top 6 Shopping Cart Security Tips

Thu, 09 Jun 2005 00:00:00 GMT

Security and privacy are big issues for Internet users. Identity theft is becoming more common place, and people fear having their information stolen, or used in ways that it was not intended. Lack of security and privacy will cause you to lose customers. You must be able to ensure your customers that their privacy will be respected, and that their billing information is secure.

1. Have a secure certificate – and keep it up to date

A secure certificate ensures that hackers can’t spy on the traffic – such as credit card numbers – traveling between your customers web browsers and your web servers. You can tell if you have a secure certificate if the page where you enter your credit card number has an address starting with https:// instead of http://. If you don’t, and you want one, talk to your web host.

Secure certificates will also expire, normally after 12 months, so make sure you renew it regularly.

2. Keep your customers data secure

Ensure that your shopping cart software encrypts your customers credit card numbers automatically – or doesn’t store it at all. When searching for a customer by an email address or invoice number, you should be able to see that they paid with a credit card, but you should not be able to see the complete credit card number. In most cases, only the last four numbers of the credit card number will be shown.

3. Choose a good password

When choosing your password to let you control your shop, be sure to use a combination of both numbers and letters. Avoid using words and numbers that are easy to figure out. For instance, your only child's first name and year of birth is easy information to figure out. Any word found in a dictionary is also easy – there are hacker programs that will automatically try all dictionary words. Something like d901ks237 is better than julie1987. You should also require your customers to use a combination of letters and numbers when setting up their passwords. Passwords should be at least eight characters long, and changed frequently.

4. Don’t leave a paper trail

If you print out order forms, make sure that they do not contain any of your customers identifying billing information. Set up a system for tracking sales that does not include such information, and destroy the printed order forms and order logs.

5. Be careful of employees

If you have employees, restrict access to customers billing information if possible. However, if they must have access to perform their jobs, you need to ensure that they are not sharing your customer’s information with anyone. Don’t forget to close their accounts if an employee leaves. If you must provide access to a third party, such as a programmer, make sure that you go in and change the password as soon as the job is completed.

6. Stay up to date

For greater shopping cart security, make sure that you are using the most up-to-date version of your shopping cart software. Check the developers site on a regular basis for information about updates, known bugs, and security issues. You will also need to make sure the server your website and shopping cart are hosted on is up-to-date. Ask your webhost how often they update both the servers and their operating systems, and keep an eye on the hosts site for information about bugs and security issues as well. Also make sure your PC is up to date – you’ll need a firewall, and to apply all the latest patches. Most operating systems (including Windows XP) have a function to do this automatically.

You should also verify that your host is using a firewall to protect sensitive information, and that a log is kept of all visitors to your website - even if they do not buy anything. These files are not to be used to capture personal data about your visitors. The main information you are interested in is their IP number, which will be needed in case your site is hacked.

Talk with your webhost, shopping cart host, merchant account service provider, and anyone else involved with the set up of your ecommerce website. Work with them to ensure that you can guarantee your customers the greatest amount of privacy and security possible.

Ten Ways to Grow Your Online Store Sales

Thu, 14 Sep 2006 00:00:00 GMT

By Julian Green, ProStores Director

These days, setting up an online storefront is easier, less expensive and more valuable than ever as more and more people get comfortable shopping online. Setting up an online storefront is a great way to start a business or grow sales by extending the reach of your current business. Whether you are opening your shop online for the first time or have already started down the path, you can boost your online sales through ten techniques that are helping today's online businesses succeed. Any or all of these strategies can be incorporated to help drive more people to your site and make it more attractive to potential customers.

Keywords
Search terms are crucial. Even your most frequent and loyal customers are likely to find your site by search. Having relevant keywords in your page titles, product titles and links can make all the difference when trying to drive customers to your site. For those with established sites, don't forget that keeping your keywords current and relevant is an ongoing project. Check your Web logs regularly to see what visitors search for on your site, and name pages and products appropriately.

A common mistake is using the same page title for every page on the site, for example, "Jane's Camera Shop". People typically do not search for your company's name when they look for a product they'd like to purchase. Give each page title a distinct name, like "Jane's Camera Shop – Macro Lenses," and do the same for every product.

Also, make sure the text embedded in a link (the anchor text) matches user search terms. For example, a link that says, "view lilac scented candle," is more descriptive of your product than, "click here for larger image"; and because it contains a descriptive keyword, it will more likely show up in search results.

Content
Adding as much relevant content as you can to your site improves your customer's experience and the positioning of your site on the search engines. They critical word here is relevant. Content that isn't related to your products can work against you, as it confuses the potential customers and gives search bots the impression that you're trying to trick them.

One way to add relevant content to your site is to add descriptive paragraphs about each of your products next to your photos. Use as much detail as you feel is necessary, and be sure to use the terms people are most likely to enter when searching.

Another way to improve your content might be to write a company backgrounder to let people know who you are, where you are located and how you got started with your online business. People often look for a personal touch online. Telling your customers about you and your business will make them more comfortable buying from someone they don't know.

Ease of use is another key element to a great Web store. Be sure that people can find everything they are looking for on your site. Make it easy to find your customer service number (or e-mail address), your return policy and an FAQ (frequently asked questions) page. These are great ways to make buyers more comfortable doing business with you, while adding relevant content to your site.

Lastly, if you offer some sort of promotion, such as 20 percent off two or more products or free shipping when you spend $50, make sure it is mentioned on every page. The more people are reminded of this, the more likely they will be to make use of it.

Customer Testimonials
Customer testimonials are another way to add content to your site while building trust and overcoming skepticism with potential buyers, as long as they are done right. A good buyer testimonial will make a buyer feel more comfortable with you and substantiate some of the claims made on your site.

How do you get them? Ask people! A satisfied customer will usually be happy to provide you with a testimonial. All you need is a sentence or two – something brief that outlines what it is that has made them a satisfied customer. Did you provide great customer service? Did they love your product? You can set up an auto-responder to ask your customers whether they enjoyed their experience with your business and whether they'd like to be included as a customer reference on your Web site.

Including their first name, hometown and sometimes age can add credibility to your testimonials. Once you have them, you can add them to a customer testimonial section on your Web site, or add one to the bottom of every page. This way people are reminded wherever they go how great it is to do business with you.

Just remember – your testimonials must be real. People will be able to detect a fake, no matter how good a fake it may be.

Offer Multiple Payment Options
This may seem obvious to some, but offering multiple payment options ensures you will be able to do business with just about anybody. Many people are still afraid to give their credit card numbers online. PayPal is an option many people are comfortable with, because it allows people to use their credit cards or their debit accounts without giving you, the business owner, their personal information.

Another method is offering people an e-bill. This could be a simple e-mail you set up to send someone after they check out, with an order confirmation and a shipping address where they can send you a check or money order. Let them know that you'll ship their order as soon as you receive payment, and list an expiration date to ensure you aren't waiting for months on unfulfilled orders.

Diversify Your Sales Channels
The best way to get in front of as many potential customers as possible is to sell through multiple channels. Having your own store is one way to attract customers, but people regularly look for products in many other marketplaces, as well. One such example is eBay.com, which is one of many online communities. Some online storefront technology, like ProStores, allow you to manage sales in your own store as well as on other platforms, such as Shopping.com, BizRate and Yahoo! Shopping. You can view and rearrange products in your store, on eBay and on other online shopping sites to maximize your exposure and revenues by targeting different buyers in different places. You may find that your t-shirts sell well on eBay, while buyers coming to your Web site are more interested in boots and cowboy hats. You can adjust your inventory according to what sells faster in each place.

Pay-Per-Click Advertising
This is one of the fastest and most effective ways to get in front of your target audience, but it does require some investment. Most of the major search engines offer pay-per-click advertising, which involves bidding on keywords in order to have a link to your Web site show up at the top of the paid search list when a user types in that keyword. You only pay for the users that click through to your site, so it is a great way to reach potential buyers that already are looking for products you have for sale. Each keyword is priced differently, based on how many businesses are bidding for that keyword.

Some things to keep in mind when launching a pay-per-click advertising campaign are 1) targeting your keywords to the most relevant search terms and 2) making sure you can afford the keywords you've selected. To the first point, using more general keywords may generate more traffic, but they won't necessarily bring in visitors that are looking to buy your products. Using more specific keywords will narrow your traffic to potential buyers more likely to purchase. To the second point, it's easy to get carried away bidding on certain keywords, but you want to make sure those paid clicks are bringing in enough sales to cover the expense.

A simple way to figure this out is to calculate the value of each visitor to your site. You can do this by carrying out the following calculation:

Divide the number of unique visitors to your site (per week or month) by the number of sales during that same time to get your visitor conversion rate
Then divide your net profits by your total number of sales to get your net profit per sale,
Finally, divide your net profit per sale by the visitor conversion rate to get the value of each individual user.

Once you know the value of an individual visitor, you'll know how much you can pay per click, or pay per visitor, to earn a profit.

A less competitive (and less costly) option may be to purchase local pay-per-click ads--ads that will only show up when searchers in your local area enter your keywords. Some major search engines offer this type of service. Be sure to do your research to see which engines offer your keywords at the best prices.

Start an Affiliate Program
An affiliate program enlists the help of other people to promote your businesses. It's a simple way to drive more traffic to your site, and it only costs you when someone makes a purchase on your site. Affiliates use a number of ways to drive people to your site, through advertisements, links, referrals, etc. For each referral that results in a sale, you pay the affiliate a small commission. The more affiliates you have, the more opportunities you gain for people to be directed to your site.

This is a lower-cost method of advertising than pay-per-click advertising, because you only pay when a purchase is made. However, you do have to pay a commission high enough to motivate your affiliates to promote your product. Several affiliate management software programs are available to help you track which affiliate sells what, so you easily can keep track of how much you owe them.

An interesting tactic some small-business owners employ is encouraging their affiliates to bid against them on their keywords on the pay-per-click search engines. This may sound strange at first, but it actually helps you get more exposure in the search results: instead of your being up there next to your competitors, you're up there next to your affiliates, who are also driving people to your Web site!

Become an Affiliate for Someone Else
Now that you've grown a base of people on the Internet, linking to your online store, why not link to someone else's? Before you jump into this one, consider what your customer might be interested in that you don't offer. For example, if you offer fishing gear, you may want to link to a local fishing guide's Web site or a site that offers information on seasonality for local fishing spots. Someone in your area may have an affiliate program for a boating store. By pointing your customers to relevant businesses and services, you are offering them more value; and you could make some extra money working as an affiliate for someone else. Consider trading links with other businesses, so they are driving customers back to you, too.

E-mail Marketing Campaigns
While receiving unsolicited e-mails may bug some people, many of your customers may actually want to hear from you. An easy way to find out is to ask them. After a customer has made a purchase, you can ask them whether they'd like to opt in to get e-mail updates on sales and other news. The tricky part is writing an e-mail that they will want to read. Providing more value than simply promoting your products or services is one way to do this.

For example, offering readers tips for summer gardening while promoting your gardening supply sale, or letting readers know about upcoming concerts in their area while announcing your two-for-one CD sale, might encourage readers to look forward to your e-mails. If you know the local fishing guide is having a spring special, why not let your readers know as a courtesy? Someone who may not have thought about purchasing something from your store right away might see the ad and think, "I'd really like to take advantage of this special, but I can't go without a new pair of waders" (which they can buy in your store).

Create a Blog
Blogs are becoming more and more popular, and are quite simple to create. As an addition to your online store, a blog can be an effective marketing and customer relationship management tool. A blog about topics that are relevant to your customers, for example summer gardening or fly-fishing, provides a forum for your customers to communicate about topics that interest them and provides you with a pulse on your customer sentiment. If you are also passionate about the topic, you will enjoy writing about it and your customers will enjoy reading about it.

Keep in mind, you don't want to blatantly promote your products at every possible opportunity – this will turn people off. Use the opportunity to talk about something complementary to your business. Your customers will appreciate the value of related information and remember to check your Web site when they need something you sell.

Using the fly-fishing example, a blog about local fishing spots and favorite fish tales may be of interest to your customers. Enthusiasts will come to your blog to share their stories, ask each other questions and maybe even share pictures of their favorite catch. You could hire a local fly-fisherman to answer their questions for a couple of hours. Keeping your customers involved in their areas of interest and, again, providing value will help instill loyalty and trust among your customers. Post a link to your fishing-gear store at the bottom of the page, or note at the top of the page that the blog is sponsored by your online store. Later, when people are looking for new fly-fishing gear, they'll come to your store first.

With a bit of enthusiasm, some savvy marketing techniques and a customer orientation, you can create a highly popular online store that attracts buyers from regions you never would have reached with a street-front location. By making your store not just a catalog outlet but a true "destination" with its own loyal following, you can elevate your business above your competitor's sites and build a strong reputation online.

Should I use an affiliates marketing program?

Thu, 23 Jun 2005 00:00:00 GMT

An affiliate marketing program is a way to get people to sell your stuff for you! For example, if you have an online shop selling cosmetics, a cosmetics information site would link to some of your products. If a customer clicks on that link on their site and buys from you, the site that put up the link would receive a commission. It's a way to encourage others to promote and sell your goods. Commissions vary, some affiliate programs pay over 50% for digital goods, a 2% - 20% affiliate commission is more common for physical goods.

The benefits of running an affiliate program go beyond increasing sales. Having a large number of affiliates linking to you increases your ranking in search engines such as Google which interprets a link to you site as a vote of confidence in your sites. It's also a form of free marketing - someone else is getting your name out there.

There are some downsides to affiliates marketing programs

So is it all good? There are some downsides to affiliates marketing programs. The most basic one is managing the program. Some shopping carts such as Actinic or Agora Cart offer a built in affiliates program. Features of the affiliates program varies between shopping carts, but they should all allow you to calculate which of your affiliates made which sales. However, there will inevitably be questions from affiliates to deal with, and time maintaining key relationships.

Some merchants have problems with their affiliates spamming or doing other dubious marketing practices, which will ultimately reflect on you despite you not being responsible for it, so you need to be careful with your terms & agreements as well as policing your affiliates. You also need to make sure the margins on your products are enough to be able to offer an attractive enough commission to attract affiliates.

Companies such as BFast offer solutions to help you manage more complex affiliates program.

How do I get a design that makes my shop look great?

Sat, 11 Jun 2005 00:00:00 GMT

A template refers to the standard design that is used for a website. On most websites, pages look basically the same. This is because the pages are using a standard template. The template normally applies to the "chrome", which is the header, the navigation and the footer. The body area changes from page to page. Using a standard template for your ecommerce site provides a consistent design, and lets customers know quickly how to navigate around your site. An ecommerce template might have some specific design or technical features which make it particularly applicable to an ecommerce site where a standard template might not work. For example, most online shops have a section on the page letting you know what's in your shopping cart. This needs to be incorporated into the template.

There are a few ways to get an ecommerce template. The easiest & cheapest way is that virtually all shopping carts come with one or more built in templates. Some carts, such as Q-Shop come with several templates built in, and are building a library of ecommerce templates to download. If you are integrating with an existing site, these built in ecommerce templates may not work well with the rest of the site. Some shopping carts allow you to use an editor such as frontpage, dreamweaver or golive to edit the templates. For example, MX Kart supports using dreamweaver to edit the templates.

Another approach is to get a web designer to make one for you from scratch. You then may need a programmer to modify your shopping cart to incorporate the template. Some shopping cart packages are easier to apply templates to than others. This is the most flexible approach, but it's also the most costly & time consuming. You'll need to make sure your designer and programmer are familiar enough with the shopping cart you have so they don't create an ecommerce template which is incompatible with it.

You can also use a pre-made template. A site like Template Monster has hundreds of templates you can download & start working immediately. You know exactly what you are getting, and they are pretty cheap. The downside is that unless you pay a premium, they may be other sites using the same template as you. Similar to that approach is using Ecommerce Templates. They sell pre-made templates which are also shopping carts, so if you find a template you like, it's the best of both worlds. They also support special frontpage templates, dreamweaver templates and golive templates so you can use your favourite editor to update it, rather than writing HTML or CSS code.

Meet the Maker: Alistair Brookbanks of Cubecart

Sun, 11 Dec 2005 00:00:00 GMT

I'm pleased to introduce Alistair Brookbank, the director & lead developer behind CubeCart, one of the most popular shopping carts (maybe the most popular) available today. He took a few minutes to share some thoughts about the state of e-commerce with us.

Tell us about Cubecart
CubeCart started as a small university project which was published and became extremely popular and at the time of writing boasts a user base of over half a million. CubeCart became backed by a registered company in the United Kingdom to provide continual development in order to become the most widely used shopping cart solution in the world.

What is the most important thing someone thinking about setting up an online shop should consider?
I would say firstly spend time experimenting with the cart and if a free trial is available to make sure it functions how you wish. You should try many carts and write up pros and cons for your particular needs of each to help you choose. Once you have chosen one I think it is fundamental essential to give it a bright fresh design but keeping it as friendly as possible to use (no red text on a blue background please!). How many stores have you visited where it's easy to add a product to you cart BUT you cant find you basket anywhere?!? CubeCart has an extremely flexible template system which means you can customise the look and feel radically from its default designs with only (X)HTML & CSS knowledge. To help with this three templates are available to choose from out of the box.

What do you think is the most common cause of failure of an online shop? How should people avoid that?
I think many new store owners often fall into the classic mistake of believing that just because they setup an online store they will automatically make money. Careful and strategic marketing is essential for any e-business. This needs to be matched with a clear strategy of where you want to go and plan for how to get there.

What trends do you see happening in small to medium business ecommerce stores in the next few years?
Here in the United Kingdom there is expected to be a boom of up to 40% in e-tailing over the next few years and more shops providing digital downloads. After the dot com crash confidence has been regained and the people of many countries such as the Chinese are starting to have much more confidence in purchasing goods on line. What does this mean? Extra revenue for online stores of course.

What one thing do you think most shop owners should do more of?
The key to any website is content. Make you site not only display product but have informative resources, be it reviews or product installation guides. Small & Medium businesses are often blown out of the water by the big boys. Keep real testimonials about your products and service to help customer confidence.

Who do you see as the primary audience for your software?
The audience varies massively and we have users in every continent. Primarily they are small to medium businesses from home hobby stores to high turnover concert ticket sales companies, so the room for expansion is there.

Why should shop owners choose CubeCart over the competition?
CubeCart can be used 100% free if our copyright remains in place with no other restrictions. If you wish to remove it there is a small fee. We are continually releasing new versions with new features and bug fixes and have full time staff dedicated to making it progress and secure its place as the best shopping cart in the world. We take any security matter extremely seriously and will release a patch at the first possible opportunity. What's more is that there is a wonderful and dedicated community of friendly people willing to help.

Hands on with Zen Cart

Sun, 06 Nov 2005 00:00:00 GMT

Introduction

Zen Cart is a PHP/MySQL open source shopping cart. It is completely free, and comes with source code which you can freely modify. The software is developed by a community effort. The code is based on the popular osCommerce shopping cart. The goal of the Zen Cart project is essentially to make an easier to use version of osCommerce which can be installed more quickly, modified more easily and have a more usable configuration out of the box. Being a community effort, many of its users are very passionate. I expect a small group of them will disagree with anything negative said about Zen Cart, be it correct or not, so I may incur their wrath at some points in this review.

This review is based on my experiences while creating an online shop for a client using Zen Cart. As every shop has its own unique needs and requirements, your experiences will vary.

Installation

Installation was fairly straight forward. I did get confused once or twice and have to manually tweak one or two files, but I suspect most people will have a smoother experience than I did. As usual, just create your MySQL database first and have the details handy.

Initial Impressions

As with most shopping carts, it comes with an out of the box skin and configuration. This seemed to be serviceable, although the skin wasn't terribly attractive and it seemed like a lot of options were turned on, making the interface a bit cluttered for my liking. This is a minor problem, as the various modules are easily turned off.

The administration interface is reasonably well laid out and is attractive enough, although the number of options is overwhelming. It was hard to know where to start to set things up as there are so many options, which is a mixed blessing.

Skinning

Zen Cart ships with a few skins, there are more available for free and commercially. My client had very specific design requirements, and so I needed to get deep into the skinning. Frankly, I was disappointed. If you want to make superficial changes - maybe change the color, the font, the logo, the module headings, etc, then it would be a fairly painless experience. If you want to get deeper into the skinning, expect a significant battle and some mid-level PHP skills required. Skinning is such a fundamental concept I don't think it should be this hard. For example, one requirement was that some modules have a unique appearance. By default, Zen Cart requires all modules in a column look identical. While I managed to work around this, it was time consuming.

Changing text that appeared in the user interface was relatively easy in most cases, although sometimes some hunting was required, it certainly wasn't nicely centralized. The admin interface even comes with its own search tool to help find files, demonstrating how common this problem is. The folder structure seems confusing and I found it hard to locate the right file. I'm sure there's a reason for the structure, but I couldn't work it out and haven't experienced this problem with other shopping carts or similar products.

Product Management

There is a wide range of product options. Creating a product via the web interface is relatively straight forward, and there is a free add on called "Easy Populate" for those wanting to create their products in bulk. I didn't bump into any product features that couldn't be handled in a default install. For instance, product reviews, stock management and automatic thumbnail creation were all handled easily and out of the box. I did struggle to find out where to change some of these options - once again, the administration interface is a little overwhelming and not always clearly labeled. As an example, my client didn't want stock levels showing for products, and it took some hunting to find this.

Payment, shipping & taxes

There is a wide range of payment gateways available for Zen Cart. Only a few are installed by default, but many more are available for download. Installing new payment modules (or other modules) is a relatively pain free experience, and while it could be simplified further, is definitely better than most. There is no cutting and pasting of code, simply a matter of copying a few files into the right places. There's a good chance your payment gateway of choice is supported by Zen Cart.

I was impressed with the shipping module. There is a very flexible range of options, but despite it's power, it's relatively easy to use. All the options you'd expect - shipping by weight, by number of products, flat rate, etc, are all easily supported. Your shipping requirements would have to be quite unusual to not work in a default install. Management of taxes was similar, flexible and easy to use, with support for different regions. Configuring taxes was similarly flexible.

An area that could be improved is the checkout process. This process is critical to minimize shopping cart abandonment, and while not bad I felt it could have been made easier. My biggest objection was that it was unclear to the customer when payment was to be handled. While most Zen Cart shops will probably be using a third party payment processor such as 2CO or Paypal where payment is handled on an external site, in the mind of the customer this is still part of the entire payment process, where as Zen Cart gives the customer the impression that payment is a completely separate step. The Zen Cart developers could take some tips from other products such as CubeCart who handle this process much more smoothly.

Reporting

All the reports you expect to see are found out of the box. Sales, most popular products, customers, order status, etc, are all available. There isn't any highly sophisticated reports such as sales by search keyword, but that's not found in many expensive carts either. The conclusion on reporting: don't expect in depth analysis, but you should have all the essential information needed for day to day running.

Support

Being a free product, there is no formal support. You basically have 3 options. Look through the source code and work it out yourself, post to the forums and hope for the best, or pay someone to sort it out for you.

I found the source code for Zen Cart to be someone convoluted. I tried to make a few small tweaks and found it time consuming. Admittedly, PHP isn't my strongest language, but I found what I saw confusing. I have comfortable hacked other PHP shopping carts with no issues. You'll need to be at least a mid-level PHP coder in order to be able to work through the source code in a meaningful way. There does seem to be a small range of people able to give paid help. I requested a small modification via rentacoder, I wasn't overwhelmed with bidders but found someone who did quality work for me at a good price.

The forums are ok. They aren't the busiest forums in the world, and one or two questions went unanswered. The replies I received were reasonably good and helped me with a few problems.

There is some documentation available. There is an FAQ on the web site which did help me out with one or two questions. There is also a detailed administrators manual available as a PDF file. It is helpful in parts, but mostly just steps through the screens you'll come across and provides a little bit of detail, the sort of thing that should really be done inline on the site. There is a small "how to" and troubleshooting section, but not thorough enough for my liking.

Conclusion

Overall, Zen Cart is certainly a powerful piece of software. Zen Cart is worth considering if your requirements are very basic and you aren't very fussy about the look & setup of it, or if you enjoy hacking PHP and are moderately good. However, if you want a complex store up and running quickly and cheaply, I'd recommend thinking twice. Personally I would rather build my business and focus on how I can increase sales than spend hours hacking PHP files (or paying someone else to do it).

Malcolm Duffitt, the man behind EROL

Thu, 04 Aug 2005 00:00:00 GMT

I'm please to introduce you to Malcolm Duffitt, the man behind the EROL shopping cart software. Malcolm and his team have a real passion for their business - read on to find out his insights on how to make your shop more profitable!

Tell us about yourself
Malcolm Duffitt, Co-Founder & Managing Director, Dreamteam Design Ltd

In 1997, Dreamteam Design Ltd was originally setup as an out-and-out web design agency. Within three years we had created EROL (Electronic Retail OnLine) as an internal tool to help us build e-commerce stores for clients and realised that if we liked it, other designers might too. They did, mainly because we had approached it from a designer's point of view, and this design flexibility is still one of EROL's key selling-points. It's success means that the company's primary focus is no longer web design but e-commerce software development.

What is the most important thing someone thinking about setting up an online shop should consider?
We have worked with many start-ups as well as established bricks 'n' mortar retail businesses and they both have different reasons for being online. Most start-ups are totally reliant on e-commerce for their success - established retailers are perhaps looking at maybe generating an additional 10-20% revenue to their existing business. Understanding your reasons for, and your expectations of, having an online shop is key and do not underestimate what it will take to bring the shoppers in and buy so consider your marketing initiatives fully.

What do you think is the most common cause of failure of an online shop? How should people avoid that?
In terms of a shopping experience, the store design is crucial - people want to shop with confidence so first impressions count. When selling online you do not have the luxury of letting people pick up your products, so clear presentation of the products themselves within a suitably nice-looking store makes a huge difference. We have helped some of our customers re-design their stores and many come back within a few months to say their sales have significantly increased. Shoppers need clear signposts and labels, so a simple checkout process is essential. Many sites have protracted checkout methods and capture more information than is either useful or necessary - let's face it, nobody likes filling in forms! Selling online is a virtual business, so make sure you have clear methods of contact for your customers - they like to know there is a human being at the end of the phone/e-mail who can help them with any question or problem.

What trends do you see happening in small to medium business ecommerce stores in the next few years?
The SME e-commerce market has matured a lot, and customers' expectations and requirements are getting increasingly more sophisticated as they have grown their businesses online. I see a general move towards more CRM tools, as well as integration with ePOS systems, accounts and fulfillment systems becoming more important for established online businesses.

What one thing do you think most shop owners should do more of?
I think that keeping a store vibrant is important. I don't mean in terms of design, necessarily, more in terms of creating interest, particularly to repeat customers. Attracting new customers can be easy, but getting repeat custom is harder. Vary your homepage content and product offers regularly, send e-mails and do special deals and pricing for notable events like Valentines Day, 4th July etc. - you don't have to be a gift store to achieve this, it works across all product ranges, just show your customers your store has something to offer for every day and every occasion of the year.

Who do you see as the primary audience for your software?
Our customers range from the small business owner, who can successfully use EROL's tools to build his/her own store with the standard toolset and templates, right through to the designer community whose skill and experience allow them to deploy visually rich stores for their clients.

Why should shop owners choose EROL over the competition?
EROL's design flexibility is still highly-prized, but of course the product is now augmented with familiar management tools that our customers need to run their businesses everyday. An EROL store can be completely previewed offline with full functionality and EROL stores can be deployed on 99% of commercial web hosts and require no specialised hosting features. Our customers get to deal with our enthusiastic, knowledgeable and helpful staff.

3 Steps to choosing the right cart

Wed, 27 Jul 2005 00:00:00 GMT

Picking a shopping cart can be intimidating. There’s an overwhelming range of choices, and it’s often not clear where to even start. www.shopping-cart-reviews.com is great when you know what you want, but getting to that stage can be tricky.

Follow these steps and you should be able to choose a good shopping cart with confidence.

1. Understand Your Business

This seems obvious, but not always. Sometimes people say “I want to sell bike parts online! Which shopping cart do I need?” You’ll need a lot more information than that. Ideally you’ll have done a business plan already – this includes a marketing plan which will be a help.

For example, do you plan to have an affiliates program? That’s where other websites can direct sales to you in return for a commission. If that’s important to you, you need to make sure your shopping cart can support it. If you decide you want this after you’ve built your site and your shopping cart doesn’t support it, you’re in trouble.

2. Understand Your Customers

How well do you know your customers? How well do you want to get to know them? If you can easily target your customers through a niche marketing channel, for example, a professional cycling magazine, then you are in luck. However, maybe your customers would appreciate a newsletter with the latest happenings in the industry, and of course, the latest specials & items in stock. If so, you’ll need a shopping cart that supports a customer registration or newsletter function.

3. Requirements Gathering

On big websites & other computer projects, there is a person, or a team of people called business analysts, whose full time job is gathering requirements – that is, working out exactly what it is that whatever they are making is meant to do – in quite some detail.

You probably don’t have the luxury of paying someone to help you out with this, but you’re in luck. Follow these steps and you’ll be well on your way.

Download this template (.XLS file). Go through the “Requirements” column and for each item, choose a priority from the “Priority” column. For example, it might be reasonably important that you have gift certificates, so rank that as a 2. Don’t simply put everything as a 1. You may want to add a few more of your own if you have very specific requirements.
Visit www.shopping-cart-reviews.com and search for shopping carts that meet your requirements.
Get it to a short list of about 3 shopping carts, and visit each of the sites. Change the names of the “Cart 1”, “Cart 2” and “Cart 3” columns in the spreadsheet to the names of your short listed shopping carts.
Study each shopping cart in detail on their web site, and fill in the columns based on how well each one performs.
Review the spreadsheet to compare your priorities against which shopping cart best meats those priorities and you are ready to make a decision!

An interview with Harald Ponce de Leon of osCommerce

Mon, 11 Jul 2005 00:00:00 GMT

Harald Ponce de Leon, the leader of the osCommerce project/shopping cart was gracious enough to answer a few questions. He has some great insights on how to build a better shop - read the thoughts of the man behind what is possibly the single most popular shopping cart available today.

Tell us about yourself
Hi! My name is Harald Ponce de Leon and am a very mutli-cultural person. I was born in Lima (Peru), lived my life in Sydney (Australia), and have been living in Germany for the past 7 years now.

I am the project founder and leader of the osCommerce project, which was formerly known as The Exchange Project, and started working on it towards the end of 1999, and made the first project release in March 2000.

The first project release was made as an example resource study to attract collaboration with others to see where it could go from there. From here on in, the project quickly grew from an example resource study of how an online shopping system works, to a fully functional online shopping cart solution.

Today, 5 years later, the project has attracted a community of over 62,000 store owners, developers, designers, and enthusiasts, with over 2,700 community contributions made that extends the already rich projects feature base, and was renamed to osCommerce in 2001 to strengthen the awareness of the project in the community and marketplace.

What is the most important thing someone thinking about setting up an online shop should consider?
I think the most important issue a store owner has to decide on is which solution should be used to base their online store on. The next important issue is where the online store is to be located.

Some questions that should be looked at are:

Does the solution come along with a hosting package?
Can this hosting package be upgraded? (for example, from a shared hosting server to a dedicated hosting server) Does this hosting package have to be used?
Who owns the online store?
Are you free to move your online store to another hosting provider?
Can I install the online store on my personal computer? (for example, backup and testing purposes)

This does not only affect the start-up phase to which the solution should meet the store owners requirements, but also the future of where the online store is to be taken, and how it can be adapted to the growing customer base to meet the needs of current and potential customers.

What do you think is the most common cause of failure of an online shop? How should people avoid that?
There can be a lot of reasons for failure, which one has to learn from, and will focus on two basic issues that not enough thought of is put into at times.

I find it important to have a good description available of the products available for purchase, along with good photo images of the product. This is the primary means of showing potential customers what is available for sale, and when the product description pages do not deliver the content that is expected, a sale will definitely happen on someone elses store.

I also find it important to provide as much information about the store as possible, from how the business operates, who is involved, where it is located, and who to contact for questions and issues. Without this information available on the store, the presence is not taken seriously and will lead to sale losses.

What trends do you see happening in small to medium business ecommerce stores in the next few years?
I think collaboration is on the rise thanks to web services and RSS syndications. The big business ecommerce sites are already starting to offer web services to the general public, but are however focused on displaying their products on your store, and not the other way around.

Having a collaborative network of stores showing one another's products can be beneficial to the small to medium business ecommerce sites, where the customer base can grow with the increase of product assortments.

What one thing do you think most shop owners should do more of?
One of the basic areas that can be improved is on is the packaging and shipping of products. Everyone I know tends to open their packaged boxes as soon as they receive it due to the patience involved with the shipping time. I think the feeling involved is greatly inbalanced with surprisement, with more of a "I hope it's not damaged" feel towards opening the package.

This can be changed to a more positive note by adding a little surprise to the package, for example sweets and candy, a thank you card, or some merchandise products.

Such bonuses will always increase the chances of the customer returning back to the store when they need to order more products.

Who do you see as the primary audience for your software?
A majority of our audience would be developers, however more and more store owners with no programming experiences are active on our community support forum channels, aiding those in need of help as they were once helped, and even contributing new features they have worked on to the community.

This is the success of the project, with an easy to use and Open Source based solution, with a great community behind it taking it a step further in every possible way.

Why should shop owners choose osCommerce over the competition?
Due to our roots, we do not consider ourselves to be in competition with others. We are working on the project to provide a solution that can easily be worked on to meet ones own requirements, as it is impossible to provide one static solution that tries to meet everyone's requirements.

This is possible due to the osCommerce project being released under a Free Software / Open Source license, and allows everyone to "look under the hood" of their own online store, and to share their experiences with our community which has been the success of the project.

The osCommerce community has been growing continually since the project started, and welcome you to take a look, to participate, and to have a great time with us!

What's the best Dreamweaver Shopping Cart for me?

Mon, 11 Jul 2005 00:00:00 GMT

If you are a big fan of Dreamweaver, then you may want to use shopping cart software that has great Dreamweaver integration. Dreamweaver shopping cart software does have some limitations, but there are some great packages out there.

MX Kart is a specialist Dreamweaver shopping cart designed from the ground up to integrate with Dreamweaver. Sales Cart and Ecommerce Templates are another two Dreamweaver shopping carts. They are both decent carts and given their focus on Dreamweaver support they both have good suport for Dreamweaver templates.

There are certain aspects of running a shopping cart that's hard to do in Dreamweaver or by using a Dreamweaver shopping cart add in. For example, if you are running a site you probably want to view sales reports. You'll usually still need to enter some administration page for this to work. Doing this directly in Dreamweaver using your Dreamweaver shopping cart will generally be very difficult.

How does Froogle help me sell more?

Fri, 08 Jul 2005 00:00:00 GMT

You may have heard of Froogle, and if you haven't,you may have been missing out on sales. Froogle is a service offered by Google which is designed specifically to search shopping carts. It's a bit different from the normal Google search engine though. If you want to be listed in Froogle, you need to supply them information about your cart (more on that later). It's a cheap and easy way to do online shop promotion - and it's free!

People looking to buy a particular item can search for it in Froogle which will provide details about merchants selling that item and their price. For example, I recently heard about the "Fridge Phonics magnetic letter set" which I thought would be great for my young son. I went to Froogle, searched for it, found several shops selling it and bought it. If you sell that product but aren't listed on Froogle, you weren't even in the running. It's ecommerce marketing with minimal effort!

So how do you get your products listed in Froogle? Well, the first thing is that Froogle currently only works in the USA, UK and Germany. If you are outside those countries, sorry, you'll have to wait for Froogle to come to you. If you are in one of those countries, start by reading through the Froogle merchants guide to get some information. The good news is that some shopping carts are starting to automate Froogle feeds to make it painless. For example, PDG Shopping Cart will automate Froogle uploads for you.

If you have a shopping cart which doesn't support Froogle and don't want to do it the hard way, not all is lost. There are several services which will help you get your products listed in Froogle, such as Somacon's Data Feed Service, albeit with a fee attached.

Shopping Cart Review latest articles

An In Depth Look at Pinnacle Cart

Initial Impressions

Setting up & Managing Products

Payment, Shipping & Taxes

Layered navigation

Checking Out

Skinning

Marketing Tools

Product Features

Discounts

Emails

Search Engines

Other Marketing Tools

Reporting

Extensibility

Support

Other Features

Conclusion

Should I buy or rent my shopping cart?

Rented shopping carts

Downloaded shopping carts

What should I choose?

AmeriCommerce Review

Installation/Start Up process

Design/Customizing/One Page Checkout - usability factors

Product Management

SEO

Marketing

Reporting/Abandoned Carts/Path Logging

Support/Knowledgebase (Product tutorials and videos)

Custom Development

In Conclusion

Setting Prices in your Zen Cart

Discounting Philosophies

Pricing On the Internet

Visibility of Discounts: In the Cart or At Checkout Time?

In the Cart: Sales and Specials

At Checkout Time: Coupons

At Checkout Time: Group Discounts and Better Together

Quantity Discounts - Your Choice

Determining the Right Strategy

Further Reading

What is a payment gateway?

What is a payment gateway?

What will this cost me?

How does this integrate with my website?

An In Depth Look at ProductCart

Introduction

Installation

Initial impressions

Setting up and managing products

Payment, shipping and taxes

Checking out

Skinning

Marketing tools

Product features

Discounts

Emails

Search engines

Other marketing tools

Reporting

Extensibility

Support

Other features

Conclusion

Top 6 Shopping Cart Security Tips

1. Have a secure certificate – and keep it up to date

2. Keep your customers data secure

3. Choose a good password

4. Don’t leave a paper trail

5. Be careful of employees

6. Stay up to date

Ten Ways to Grow Your Online Store Sales

Should I use an affiliates marketing program?

How do I get a design that makes my shop look great?

Meet the Maker: Alistair Brookbanks of Cubecart

Hands on with Zen Cart

Introduction

Installation