Shopping Cart Review latest articles

Top 10 Must-Have Ecommerce Features

Tue, 27 Oct 2009 04:52:07 GMT

If you’re an online merchant, you already understand the importance of having a professional looking website. But do you know which ecommerce features are essential to making your website successful at selling and managing your product long term?

As the selection of shopping cart technologies and ecommerce solution providers on the market continues to grow and vie for your business, there are a handful of critical features and feature-sets that you should insist upon having. While a professional and compelling design is necessary and can "make" your business, a poor or lacking ecommerce feature set can "break" your business just as easily.

To help you navigate the sea of competing e-commerce solution and platforms and identify the best solution for your business, I’ve compiled this list of top ten must-have ecommerce features that you should be looking for (and asking questions about) as you seek a suitable shopping cart to serve your online store.

Search-engine Friendliness You’ll want your shopping cart solution to provide you with control over your own title tags, meta descriptions and keywords so that you can easily optimize at-will for the search engines. You’ll also want your solution to automatically generate keyword-rich URLS based on your product and category names and to generate page code that is XHTML 1.0 strict compliant.
PCI Compliant Hosting & Security Because your website will need to accept online payments, you must find a provider who can host your website in a PCI (Payment Card Industry) compliant environment. If you don’t know anything about PCI Compliance, you’ll need to understand your role in complying with the DSS (Data Security Standards). Currently, the card industry mandates that any merchant, organization or software that processes, stores or disseminates credit card data must be PCI DSS compliant or they risk hefty fines and/or losing the ability to process credit cards altogether thus putting your entire business in jeopardy. Although there is a lot more involved with PCI compliance than just hosting your site in a compliant environment, this is your first step.
Up-selling & Cross-selling Features Up-selling is offering customers a product that is of greater value than the product they are currently considering or adding options/features to the product they are buying in an attempt to increase their spend. Cross-selling refers to selling items that are complementary to the item they are purchasing. Any suitable shopping cart technology will offer automated features that can accomplish these marketing techniques for you with some simple set-up. Make sure that your shopping cart solution offers these valuable recommendation tools.
Product Review Feature Product reviews are a very powerful product marketing tool. In fact, research shows that even bad reviews help to sell more product than not showing reviews for a product at all. You’ll want an ecommerce solution that lets you enable customers to post reviews of the products that you sell. You can always review the posts before you choose to display them or choose to display reviews automatically on the website.
Flexible Pricing Management You’ll want to find a shopping cart that offers flexible pricing features and allows you to set-up multiple pricing options to accommodate things like promotional pricing for any product, customer, order, or time frame, wholesale or retail pricing (or both) displayed to your customers via the same catalog interface and which allows you to set-up affiliate pricing, accepts coupon codes, allows for quantity-based pricing and has tax-exempt support.
Robust Catalog Management Identify a solution that allows you to get your store started quickly by offering a bulk import/export of your catalog. You’ll find that this feature will support you throughout the life-cycle of your business and not just at start-up. Make sure that the solution also offers product cloning to simplify catalog additions, automatic resizing of your product images and has some strong inventory management capabilities such as letting you set minimum quantities and identify backordered items.
Solid Analytics & Reporting Look for a solution that integrates with Google Analytics to demonstrate real-time site and search ranking data and that offers a variety of other product performance reporting capabilities, which you’ll need to accurately monitor your business. Be sure that you can export and save these reports.
Integrated Shipping You’ll want your shopping cart solution to integrate with the major shipping providers such as USPS, UPS and Fedex and you’ll want the ability to markup shipping rate-quotes by a percentage or by a flat amount so that you have the option to charge transparent handling fees.
Product Feed Support You’ll want your shopping cart solution to have a product feed feature that will allow you to easily create a feed of your products that you can then upload to shopping comparison sites (aka "shopping engines") such as Shopzilla, Shopping.com, Google Product Search, etc. and that will allow you to create multiple product feeds for each comparison engine.
Gift Certificate/Wishlist Features Gift Certificate and Wishlist are two website features that play a major role in holiday sales conversions (according to a Demandware study). 64 percent of those surveyed said gift certificates equaled 25 percent of their online purchases and half of those surveyed said they shopped using someone else's wishlist. So, be sure to utilize these features on your site and do not consider an ecommerce solution that does not boast a robust online gift certificate and wishlist feature-set.

Making an informed decision when choosing a solution for your ecommerce website can be the difference between a successful online business and one that fails within the first year, as 50 percent of new ecommerce businesses do. So, while evaluating your options thoroughly will take some time and effort, the investment in researching your provider’s ecommerce features carefully will be well worth it as your online business develops.

AUTHOR BIO

Taunia Lin Kipp is the Chief Operating Officer and Chief Information Security Officer for Mountain Media, a privately held corporation located in Saratoga Springs, NY and serving both national and international markets.

The company’s proprietary eCommerce management platform, known as "Mountain Commerce" boasts the top ecommerce features in the industry and was named to Practical eCommerce magazine’s list of notable shopping cart solutions in late 2007. Additionally, the company offers a full compliment of commercial Web services such as Search Engine Marketing, Graphic Design, Web Hosting and Merchant Services.

Learn more at: www.mountainmedia.com

3 vital things people often forget when building an online shop

Wed, 22 Jun 2011 08:41:45 GMT

Your online shop is a storefront that is not just available to the people in your area, but is easily accessible to the entire world. It can bring in revenue at little to no upfront cost to you, and the products sold will act as walking advertisements of your business out in the real world. There are a few things to be aware of when designing your own web store, and, if you leave any of them out, it could mean the difference between online shop success and online shop flop. These three things below are vital to start treading the right path to online shop success:

Design to sell

This one may seem a little obvious, but if your store is not well designed, or if customers have a lot of figuring out to when they go to place an order, chances are that you are not getting nearly as many of them to buy from you as you could be. Think of your web store as your store real-life store. Shoppers want a stress free experience. This consists of no chaos, no confusion and no hassles. Don't rush into designing your web store - this needs to be highly considered and functional. Time is money and there simply isn't room for mistakes. Most web store hosts offer some sort of web design program, and there are tutorials all over the internet to help you push the customizability even further. If you aren't comfortable designing your store yourself, though, you can hire a professional web designer, or buy a pre designed theme. Whichever way you go, the design of your page should be creative, eye-catching and pleasant, with straight forward navigation and order placement. Think feng shui. You want your store to have a good "flow", so why not let it flow straight to the shopping cart?

Let's talk money

Next to no one is 100% comfortable with entering their credit card number on the Internet. That said, you, as an independent web store owner, need to prove to your shoppers that you are worthy of their trust. Obviously, you will want to be able to process as many credit and debit card carriers as possible (including Paypal). Open up a merchant account with your store host, in addition to providing non-virtual methods of payment, such as money orders or ordering over the phone. Keeping your customers' information safe is not only beneficial to them, but will make them more likely to do business with you--and recommend you to other customers. Use the best security and encryption program you can find for your store, and make a clear link on your store's page to the privacy/security statement that is readily available for shoppers to read.

Go tell it on the...

Street

You have your own online store and you're a little too excited that there is an "Add to Cart" button right next to your creations, as you should be. What better motivation do you have, then, to spread the word about your beautiful new boutique! Tell everyone you know - do not limit yourself to online marketing, get out and about - hang fliers around your real life store, around town, in other businesses, in college campuses.

Internet

Inevitably, the most important place to promote your web-based storefront is online. Incorporate your store into your website (make sure the web design matches). Use both organic and paid for advertising on engines such as Google and Bing. Promote yourself on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn. Use blogs and forums to write about your store and your products. If you use Blogger, your host will obviously better connect your content with potential customers' Google searches. If you use Tumblr, post your more unique products as photos, write a little blurb about them in the captions (and link to your store, of course), as Tumblr members have an option to "reblog" content with just a click, an easy stab at viral marketing. Some promoters use both Blogger and Tumblr for their separate set of benefits. Visit forums and within these post products and links, and exciting "be sure to visit!" updates.

The options the Internet provides you with to promote your online store are endless. Be sure to exploit and manipulate these to your advantage.

Sarah writes on behalf of Fluid Branding, producers of high quality Promotional Products. Trust Fluid Branding to supply all of your Promotional items including quality Promotional Mugs.

Should I buy or use a hosted 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 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 go hosted. This article compares the two types and helps you choose.

Hosted 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.
Hosted 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 customize 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 hosted 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.

What database do I need for my shopping cart software?

Wed, 15 Jun 2005 00:00:00 GMT

Almost all shopping carts use a shopping cart database to store their information in. This allows them to easily manage & update all the aspects of your shopping cart such as products, customer reviews, customer information, sales history, stock levels, etc. Without a database managing all the pages in a typical shopping cart would be a nightmare. Databases use a language called SQL which allow you to program questions like "show me all products which cost more than $50 which are available in red". Fortunately you don't need to know how databases work to get the advantages of having one.

...you don't need to know how databases work to get the advantages of having one

The most popular databases are listed below, this list covers almost all shopping carts.

MySQL. This is the most popular. It's a fast fairly powerful database with excellent integration with PHP. Being free probably helps its popularity! It's a good all round choice. osCommerce is an example of a popular shopping cart that uses MySQL.
Access. This is the popular Microsoft database that some people may have installed on their computers. The advantage of access is that it's very easy to deploy & to use. The downside is that if you are expecting a lot of visitors to your shopping cart (thousands a day) it might not handle it so well. A good database for small to medium size sites. Magic Way Shopping Cart uses access.
SQL Server. This is Microsoft's high end database, used to power some of the busiest websites in the world. There's no doubt this can handle your traffic, and its feature set is excellent. SQL Server can be pricey so web hosts offering SQL Server will often charge a premium of $10 - $20 a month or more, although some good deals can be had. It's a good choice for heavy duty web sites. ShopDotNet uses SQL Server.

So what's the right database for you? The chances are it won't make much difference unless you are expecting a lot of visitors. If you are committed to a particular web host, check which databases they support as that might restrict your options.

Get a shopping cart for free with almost no work (but what's the catch?)

Tue, 28 Jun 2005 00:00:00 GMT

There's several free JavaScript shopping carts out there. Probably the best know is NOP's Free JavaScript Shopping Cart is probably the best known one. Let's start off by looking at how JavaScript differs from the more common languages, PHP and ASP.

PHP and ASP shopping carts use scripts that run on the web server and actually create a custom web page for each customer. For example, if you do a search from the homepage of Shopping Cart Reviews you'll get a page with a customised list of results depending on your search terms. The script talks to the database, also on the server, and then creates a customised page.

JavaScript scripts run actually in your web browser, not on the server. This means that it's very difficult for them to talk to a database. Now, for a very simple site this might be ok, but as soon as you want to get more complex such as having a site search, this becomes difficult.

The other draw back of free JavaScript shopping carts is that some people have disabled JavaScript in their browser - estimates of the number of people who have done this vary between 1% and 10%. Those people won't be able to use your shop at all.

...between 1% and 10% of people won't be able to use your shop at all

However, there are advantages. NOP's Free JavaScript Shopping Cart is a free JavaScript shopping cart. If price is the only factor, there are some great free ASP and PHP shopping carts such as Os Commerce, which offer the full range of features not allowed by a JavaScript shopping cart. Another advantage is JavaScript shopping carts don't care what web host you are using, they will work with any. They can be easy & quick to setup. The downside is that they are limited in functionality and won't be accessible to all your users. So, use them, but with caution.

Which language should I choose?

Fri, 17 Jun 2005 00:00:00 GMT

The choice of which language may be very important depending on your circumstances. If you or your designers/developers have a particular preference, or your web host only supports some languages, then that will narrow your choice. Most web developers have a preferred language and so may prefer an ASP Shopping cart or a PHP shopping cart for example, although many are "multilingual". If you choose an ASP Shopping cart but your developers prefer a PHP shopping cart, you may be in trouble. ASP.NET shopping carts are becoming increasingly popular, and Cold Fusion shopping carts have a small but faithful following.

Which language is the best? There's no easy answers.

ASP. ASP stands for Active Server Pages, a technology created by Microsoft. ASP Shopping carts are the most common (although PHP shopping carts are catching up). ASP is a good all round language, and while it has effectively been replaced by the quite different ASP.NET, it is still a strong performer. VP ASP is a very popular ASP shopping cart.
PHP. PHP is probably the most popular language on the web today, particularly with small and medium websites. There is a wide range of excellent PHP shopping carts. X Cart is a very popular PHP shopping cart.
ASP.NET. ASP.NET is Microsoft's replacement for ASP. It's an extremely powerful language (this site is created using ASP.NET) and is becoming increaslingly popular with developers, although not yet as popular as PHP or ASP. We are starting to see some quality ASP.NET shopping carts coming out such as Storefront.
Cold Fusion. There's not many Cold Fusion shopping carts available, but Cold Fusion is a strong language popular with some developers for its ease of use. If you choose this for business reasons, you may find it tricky to find developers who have knowledge of it. CartWeaver have a Cold Fusion shopping cart.
Perl. Perl is the oldest popular language on the web. There are quite a few Perl shopping carts, many of them well established. Actinic is a popular Perl shopping cart.

Which language is the best? There's no easy answers

Probably the other language worth noting is MivaScript, developed especially for the very popular Miva Shopping Cart. While it is only used by Miva, Miva's popularity made it worth mentioning.

So, what impact does this have on your shopping cart? It will make little to no difference to your customers which language you use. The primary question to ask is what language your developers prefer, and what language your host prefers.

Choosing shopping cart software

Wed, 30 Jul 2008 20:40:08 GMT

by Michael Gunin, Qualiteam Software.

Introduction

Choosing shopping cart software can turn into a tough job due to the large number of e-commerce solutions available on the market. Overall, it's almost impossible to say which product is the best one since their feature richness, pricing, flexibility and the range of extra services vary to a great extent.

Therefore, buying the right product which fits into your goals can save a lot of time and effort, while a mistake may turn into extra costs, additional months of work or even cause starting the whole project from scratch.

There are several key factors which should be considered while picking the right solution. In this article, I'll try to outline the most important steps that definitely should not be missed. The tactics described below may be varied according to your goals, however, following this advice will be useful in the decision-making process as a whole.

Key groups of factors

Who you are

In my opinion, the first thing you should ask is the role he's going to play in the online store functioning process. The key factor of this role (at least for small and medium businesses) is the level of a person's technical knowledge.

In most cases, technology is an issue for store owners, managers and administrators. Since each store needs its own unique design, functionality and storefront design along with the initial setup and server administration, you should clearly understand how these services could be purchased and what the manufacturer has to offer. Another important issue for this target group is the ease of administration and usage of basic functions.

Another group of users are web developers and designers who are technically skilled and usually maintain the store by themselves or develop e-commerce solutions for their clients (which usually involves complex code changes and development of extra functionality). For these people, the most important factors are: the quality of code, the ease of customization and add-ons implementation and flexibility of storefront design.

Types of shopping carts

All shopping cart solutions can be divided into two large groups: hosted and distributed.

Hosted carts are usually provided in the same manner as hosting services, which means that a customer has several predefined plans/packages (varying in number of products, monthly bandwidth, number of features, etc) to choose from. The pricing structure is also based on regular (monthly or yearly) fees. A hosting platform is provided directly from the manufacturer and the cart is usually activated without any actions needed from a client.

Hosted shopping carts are managed through the administration area which provides the interface to manage product catalog (add, remove items and edit their properties), define and change prices and so on. The storefront design can usually be altered by modifying templates, however, the access to the source code for hosted solutions is usually limited and it's not always possible to modify the functionality.

Distributed solutions are sold at a fixed price (one-time fee for a lifetime license) as a software package which should installed on any compatible server chosen by a customer. After the initial setup, the store can also be managed using the administration area.

Usually such products come with source code and thus can be modified or extended to suit your needs. However, such modifications require good technical and programming knowledge (or working with those that have those skills).

Overall, hosted carts are often preferable for store owners as more easy to use and administer while web programmers, designers and developers mostly choose distributed solutions due to their flexibility.

Additional services

While most shopping cart features can often be used right out of the box, it's important to note that in most cases online stores require some additional professional services.

For example, e-commerce software may come with a number of pre-installed design templates, but a serious store owner would usually have its own unique store look or integrating it's existing design into the storefront. Also, since it's impossible for an ecommerce product containing each and every possible feature or working the way which is totally suitable for everyone, a shopping cart manufacturer providing custom programming service is a good option in case you're planning to implement some extended functionality.

Another option worth checking is whether it's possible to get a fully-compatible hosting solution (since shopping carts usually have significant server-side requirements due to their complexity) and technical support (in case you need consultations or assistance in problem resolution).

Integration with external systems

Ecommerce software should not be treated as a standalone product, but rather as a solid ground for interaction between various components.

Not all operations are performed within the shopping cart engine. Most often, external services are used for payment processing, real-time shipping rates calculation, order processing systems, affiliate and statistics software, product directories and so on.

Thus, the richness of integration allows store owners to have a wider choice of services for their online business.

Technical support, forum & third-party solutions

Responsive technical support is another key factor which ensures that you're not left alone with your problems and, in case the assistance is needed, you can be sure to receive a thoughtful response or a solution in a reasonable amount of time.

Support schemes from different companies may vary in type and costs. For shopping cart vendors, technical support is often on a pay-per-incident basis, or yearly/monthly flat-fee contract. Free technical support for ecommerce solutions is quite rare and may not always be effective or timely.

Forum activity is also a good indicator since it can be a good, free source of knowledge and assistance from experience software users.

In addition, it is advisable to check if third-party vendors offer modules or services related to a chosen e-commerce product to ensure that you will have a decent choice of extra solutions.

Tips and advice for research

Requirements

First of all, before proceeding with the actual product research, I'd advise that you collect the list of key features which are necessary for your upcoming online store. Such a checklist will allow you to ensure that all (or most) of them are present while examining features lists for chosen candidates.

Looking in search engines using relevant queries

Next, you may proceed with picking products for comparison. To find the most popular solutions, start searching in Google/Yahoo/MSN using relevant search phrases characterizing the product, like "shopping cart software", "ecommerce solution", "online store builder" etc.

For each query, pick products from top ten or top twenty search results. Visit their websites, compare product features and services presented there, pricing and any other information that you may consider relevant.

Looking for reviews and comments on forums and directories

For each product in your list, you would surely be interested to know what others have to say. In this case, independent sources provide valuable additions to official information from software vendors.

Most likely, product profiles along with customer reviews can be found on large script and software libraries like HotScripts, Freshmeat and Download.com. Also, check out some comparison sites, for example, Epinions and Shopping Cart Reviews. Also, you may search through archives or start a new thread with your questions at popular IT forums, like SitePoint or WebmasterWorld.

Contacting sales department with your questions

Finally, I'm sure that for your short list of solutions, some questions may still remain. This is a good reason to contact a vendor's sales team to find out their responses. Do not hesitate to do it, since the quality of feedback and attention to you as a potential client is worth checking before you actually proceed with the purchase.

Conclusion

Choosing shopping cart software may not seem easy since it involves significant effort from a serious customer. However, the rewards for the effort is obvious: you get a product which fits into your goals and allows you to concentrate on sales and marketing without worrying about the technical side. Moreover, as a client, you get to know the software vendor before buying a product and ensure that the technical side can be handled without a problem.

As a possible option, I'd like to suggest that you take a look at ecommerce products from the company I work for, Qualiteam Software. We are the makers of two PHP shopping carts, X-Cart and LiteCommerce. Both of our solutions come with an open source code and can be used both as ready out-of-the-box shopping cart solutions and powerful shopping cart engines for a customized web shop. We also provide the whole range of extra services, including (but not limited to): shopping cart hosting, e-commerce web site design, custom development, installation services & 24/7 technical support.

Good luck in your research!

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.

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.

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.

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!

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.

Find the best Frontpage Shopping Cart Software for your Online Shop

Tue, 28 Jun 2005 00:00:00 GMT

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

Sales Cart and Ecommerce Templates are probably the two most popular Frontpage shopping carts. They are both decent carts and given their focus on Frontpage support they both have good suport for Frontpage templates. CartIt Commerce System also has a free Frontpage plugin that helps you manage your cart.

There are certain aspects of running a shopping cart that's hard to do in Frontpage or by using a Frontpage 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 Frontpage using your Frontpage shopping cart will generally be very difficult.

However, Frontpage allows less technical people an opportunity to set up an online shop quickly and easily.

A Brief History of the Shopping Cart

Tue, 21 Jun 2005 00:00:00 GMT

The first shopping cart was introduced on June 4, 1937, the invention of Sylvan Goldman, owner of the Piggly-Wiggly supermarket chain in Oklahoma City. With the assistance of Fred Young, a mechanic, Goldman constructed the first shopping cart, basing his design on that of a wooden folding chair. They built it with a metal frame and added wheels and wire baskets, and advertised the invention as part of a new "No Basket Carrying Plan."

The invention did not catch on immediately. Men found them effeminate; women found them suggestive of a baby carriage. "I've pushed my last baby buggy," offended women informed him. After hiring several male and female models to push his new invention around his store and demonstrate their utility, as well as greeters to explain their use, shopping carts became extremely popular and Goldman became a multimillionaire. Goldman continued to make modifications to his original design, and the basket size of the shopping cart increased as stores realized that their customers purchased more as its size increased.

From Wikipedia, this content covered by the GNU Free Documentation License.

5 Worst ways to pick a Shopping Cart

Wed, 08 Jun 2005 00:00:00 GMT

Picking a good shopping cart can be a make or break deal for your online business. If you choose the wrong software, you might be stuck with some software that’s hard to manage, hard to configure, or that doesn’t grow as your business does. But no one said choosing a shopping cart was easy. There’s an enormous range of choices, and it’s pretty hard to work out what’s good and what’s bad. Obviously, www.shopping-cart-reviews.com helps you come up with a short list, but how do you then pick the tool to base your e-commerce success on? Here’s 4 things you shouldn’t do!

1. Don’t plan your site

How many projects have you work on where at the end you’ve said “you know, we spent too much time planning this”? If you’re anything like me, you’ve never said that! Unless you understand how your business will work and how you will sell online, you won’t be able to make an informed decision. Here’s a hint: it’ll take more than an hour to work it out. Planning is hard work, but it’ll pay off – big time.

2. Don’t involve your techies

If you are a business person using some technical folk or web designers to help you out, not getting them involved will help bring on certain failure. Setting up a shopping cart well is a lot of work. If the cart you choose is hard to adapt to your existing design, or is incompatible with the rest of your site, you’ll end up with something second rate or spending many dollars getting your techies to sort out the problems.

3. Get your techies too involved

Am I contradicting point 2? Nope. The other side of the coin is letting your business be driven by technology. You might have the world’s best technology and nicest site, but if it doesn’t allow you to run the shop the way you want it’ll hurt your sales. The challenge is finding a balance between the business and the technology. The business is king, but the technology can dethrone that king pretty quick, so make sure you keep things in balance!

You might have the world’s best technology and nicest site, but if it doesn’t allow you to run the shop the way you want it’ll hurt your sales.

4. Don’t worry about the search engines till later

Some online shops are lucky enough to have a niche audience which allow them to get customers via community sites, or perhaps newsletters, etc. The rest of us are dependant at least in part on people finding us in the search engines. So, if the search engines are so important, don’t leave them till later – make them a part of your planning from day one.

Shopping carts are complex pieces of software, and depending on how they are created, search engines will sometimes have troubles crawling them. I don’t know about you, but if I’m selling 100 products on my site, I want all 100 to be in Google, not just a few. How do you make sure this happens? First, check out what the shopping cart company says – do they claim their site is easily crawled by Google? If they do, that’s a great start. Check a couple of their sample customer sites (we list 3 sample customer sites for most shopping carts on www.shopping-cart-reviews.com).

Here’s what you do next: go to a customer site, find one of their products, copy and paste the URL into Google and do a search on it. If Google comes back with:
Google can show you the following information for this URL:

Show Google's cache of www.someshop.com/someproduct.php

Then that’s a good sign. If Google says

Sorry, no information is available for the URL www.someshop.com/someproduct.php

That’s a bad sign. Make sure you check out a few sample sites to make sure it’s not just one customer who has set up their site badly or is brand new.

If the search engines don’t like your shopping cart there are workarounds, but it’s more work.

5. Avoid all Shopping Carts that don’t have unlimited free support

“I’ve paid $500 for this shopping cart, why should I pay another $50 to get help with it?”
Most shopping carts are complex pieces of software, and there’s always going to be something all but the most experienced techie struggles with. Paying for support is important for the company making the shopping cart in order to be able to keep working. Otherwise, they’d sell a few hundred copies and then spend the rest of their time supporting their existing customers for free!

You don’t always need to pay for support – most shopping carts have a customer support forum where you can ask help from other users. Sometimes the developers of the shopping cart will pitch in and answer for free as well. There’s also a good chance someone has had the same problem, so see if the forums has a search function, or if the developers have a knowledge base you can search.

In my opinion, the fairest model for all is having some limited initial support including in the price of the shopping cart to give you some basic assistance to get up and going, and then paid support after that – in addition to a free customer forum of course

Free Shopping Carts – Bargain or Baloney?

Wed, 08 Jun 2005 00:00:00 GMT

The shopping cart system that you choose for your business is affected by a number of things – including price, especially if you have a tight budget. Luckily, shopping carts come in a variety of prices, including free.

The important thing to realize about free shopping carts - or anything else that is free for that matter - is that 'free' usually comes with a price, even if that price isn't paid in dollars. Sometimes, the price is paid with advertisements that may appear on your shopping cart pages. Your customers may also pay the price for your free shopping cart, by being required to sign up for other services. Most commonly, free shopping carts either have few features, or require significant technical skills & time to get working.

'Free' usually comes with a price, even if that price isn't paid in dollars

For instance, Paypal, which is quickly becoming one of the most popular payment choices on the Internet, offers a free shopping cart for their merchants. This shopping cart displays the Paypal logo in several places, and requires your customers to become Paypal account holders. Although this is an easy process for your customers, since their sign up is integrated with the ordering and payment of your product, it is still requiring that your customer sign up for a service that they may not want. Furthermore, Paypal will be collecting a small percentage of each sale you make. So, it really isn't free at all, but it is a great option for someone just starting out in ecommerce.

Another drawback to using free shopping carts is that they are usually not nearly as full featured as paid shopping carts. Paid shopping carts will have more features in most cases. There are some noteable exceptions to this, such as Zen Cart. With paid shopping carts, technical support is usually offered as part of the package. Free carts tend to be support via a forum. If you have little or no programming skills, you should either choose a paid shopping cart where you will be able to get support if needed, or check out the forum of the free cart to see how responsive & friendly they are, particularly to less technically savvy users.

Many web hosts offer free shopping carts. This could be a problem if you want to change web hosts at the shopping cart will not move with you. Web hosts rarely offer tech support for the shopping carts. You should also note that many of the free shopping cart hosts will send your customers information to a 'shared secure server.' This might give you limited control over the design of your payment pages.

Many merchant accounts offer free shopping carts to their customers as well. Again, these may not be as full featured, or as fully integrated as paid shopping carts, although, in most cases, they are already installed for you, and quite easy to set up. As with the shopping carts that are offered with web hosting accounts, you will lose your shopping cart if you change merchant accounts.

Other free shopping carts will probably need programming skills to install and configure it. If you will need to hire a programmer for this, you should determine if you would be better off by purchasing an easier to us shopping cart.

While a free shopping cart may be the only option you have when starting up your business, make sure you do your homework and don't end up paying more in the long run.

Do I need source code for my shopping cart?

Mon, 13 Jun 2005 00:00:00 GMT

I'll start by defining "source code" and "open source". There's a lot of confusion around the term "open source", and this especially applies to shopping cart source code. Source code simply refers to having a copy of the code used to make the shopping cart run. However, the license, meaning what you are legally allowed to do with that code, under which the source code is made available varies enormously.

There are two broad categories under which shopping cart source code licensing falls. Firstly is commercial licenses. VP ASP is an example of this. You have to buy the software in order to get the source code, and you are then limited in what you can do with it. For example, if you made significant changes to the source code you wouldn't be allowed to then start selling it or giving it away as a product.

The other sort is a non-commercial license, most common with free shopping cart source code. There are a few variants of this, the most common is called a GPL license. This basically means you can make whatever changes you want, but if you then distribute those changes, you must include all source code with that distribution. That stops someone from getting a free shopping cart, making a few changes, and then distributing it under a commercial license. These shopping carts are almost always free, including the free shopping cart source code.

...there's a good chance your shopping cart will include source code.

Why would you want source code? There are a number of advantages. If you find a bug in the software, and you have the technical skills or have access to them, you can fix it straight away, rather than waiting for the developers to fix it, which may in some cases take an unacceptable length of time. Similarly, if you want a modification made you can do that yourself. Open source shopping carts often tend to have a strong developer community offering lots of plugins and modifications. It's often easy to find a programmer who will make changes or fixes for you for free or cheaply. A good example is osCommerce source code can be obtained for free and there are hundreds of developers actively using & working on it.

The downside is something called forking. Lets say you've changed the source code to add a new feature. When the next version of the shopping cart is released, the developers may have made changes to the same part of the software as your changes, making it effectively impossible for you to use the latest version without additional work or loosing your custom modifications.

If you choose a shopping cart without source code availability you should check their support so you aren't stuck if you run into problems in the future.

Most shopping carts are written using either PHP or ASP, in both cases due to the nature of those languages it's very hard for the developers to not make source code available, so there's a good chance your shopping cart will include source code.

Should you buy or rent your shopping cart?

Wed, 08 Jun 2005 00:00:00 GMT

When choosing the shopping cart software that is best for you and your customers, you have the option to choose a shopping cart supplied by a webhost or buy a shopping cart and host it yourself. There are advantages and disadvantages to both options.

The biggest advantage of hosted shopping carts is technical skills aren’t required to set up the shopping cart – the host does the hard work. You will not be required to provide the secure certificate, and you can get straight into setting up your shop.

The disadvantages associated with remotely hosted shopping carts is that there is usually a monthly fee that you will need to pay. You also run the risk of the host closing their business, leaving you without a shopping cart. You may be given less control over your shopping cart pages which may make it difficult to match the shopping cart design to be similar to your website.

If you decide to use a hosted shopping cart, make sure that you check the host out thoroughly. Assure yourself they will not be accessing your customers sensitive data, or harvesting your database for their email addresses – their privacy policy is a good place to check.

The main advantages of buying shopping cart software that you host yourself is that you will not have any monthly fees, and you will usually have more control over how the pages are displayed.

Some shopping carts are very simple to install, while others may require some technical skills. The upfront costs are higher but the ongoing fees are lower.
You may also need to get a secure certificate – your webhost can usually help you with this.

No matter which option you choose, you will need to be sure that the shopping cart can be used with your merchant account. Explore all of your options for your shopping cart, and choose the one that will best serve the needs of you and your customers, based on what your business can afford.

How to Write Good Product Descriptions for an Ecommerce Site

Sat, 21 May 2011 21:53:45 GMT

As more and more people turn to buying products online instead of in stores, eCommerce sites are booming with business and companies selling products online have gained a definitive edge. In order for your products to sell well, however, you have to do more than simply offer them online. Regardless of your industry, clients will have a sea of choices to wade through when making their online purchases. Excellent product descriptions will make your company's products stand out. These five tips will show you how to write product descriptions that will bring about the client conversion you want and grow your products' popularity and credibility.

Create an original product description. Using a recycled description of the product you are selling will not increase your rankings in search engines and will not increase your customer base. Create descriptions that are compelling, informative and unique. When writing the descriptions, pay close attention to the audience for which you are writing, the voice you are using and the structure of the piece.
Write with search engine optimization in mind. Sales will increase if more clients are able to find your products. Write product descriptions that are at least 250 words in length. Identify frequently searched, relevant keywords associated with your products and incorporate them and variations of them. Be sure to include links to related products or categories within your product descriptions.
Keep your customer in mind. When writing product descriptions, vary the content and make it easily accessible to potential customers. Tone down "word density" by using bullet points and subheadings. Make sure to include basic product information within the description, which could include product color, material and/or dimensions. Each product will have specific information you should make easily available to clients. It is also helpful to outline the benefits of using the product within the description.
Include product images. Customers who can see what they are about to buy are more likely to follow through with their purchases. Include images that are professional and high quality. Even more likely to improve sales is the integration of interactive product media around the description. Images and interactive media keep potential customers on your site longer and, in general, customers who stay longer are more likely to buy something you are selling or bookmark your site to return to later.
Include product reviews. The inclusion of product reviews and ratings with a product description is a wonderful way to engage your client base, provide information about a product that might not be included in the original description and provide assurances to your potential customers about the quality of the products you are selling. Many customers will not buy from a site that does not include product reviews and ratings.

Randall Davidson is the lead project manager and a co-founder of ProofreadingServices.Us, a professional proofreading services company based out of San Francisco, CA. Randall's company has proofread thousands of product descriptions and learnt how to make them perform. Similar posts can be found at ProofreadingServices.Us as well as information about Randall's company's business proofreading services.

How to Design Your Website with Clients in Mind

Thu, 24 Mar 2011 05:47:13 GMT

How to Design Your Website with Clients in Mind

There are few things more important to the creation of a website than making it user-friendly for your clients. Of course you want to create an aesthetically pleasing web space that will speak to your demographic, reinforce your brand image, and possibly even win accolades (what else would you expect if you shell out for an award-winning graphic designer?). But if your clients can't figure out how to navigate through your site, find the products and services they're looking for, get questions answered, and ultimately, hire you or purchase your wares, then it doesn't matter how great your website looks. In short, you need to embrace the design mantra "form follows function" in order to ensure that those who visit your website can actually become your customers. Here are just a few ways to make your website effective.

1. Avoid clutter. There's nothing worse than visiting a website that appears promising only to discover an appalling clutter of text, graphics, and buttons that you can barely wade through, much less find what you're looking for. Keep it simple if you want to appeal to a viewer's sense of balance and order. Pare down the text to make it digestible, limit graphics to just a couple of well-picked pix per page, and don't have any more buttons or links than are absolutely necessary. Also, keep pop ups and other ads to a minimum (or forego them altogether for an experience that clients will find a lot less annoying).

2. Make navigation obvious. Your buttons don't have to be visible from outer space, but they should be large enough to be noticeable and placed so that visitors can easily navigate to the area they're interested in (whether it's your blog, an "about" page, or your online store). By making sure that anyone who visits your page can easily find their way around, you have a much better chance of making a sale.

3. Check links frequently. How do you think you would feel if you found an item you liked for sale on a website only to click the "buy" button and find the link broken? Certainly it seems like a minor frustration in the grand scheme of things, but how likely would you be to follow through on your purchase by calling a contact number? And be honest: what are the odds you'd ever come back to the site? Now you know how your clients feel when one of your links breaks, so make every effort to check them frequently and update accordingly.

4. Provide appropriate tools. The obvious tools of the trade for any business include a way to connect with customers, a forum for them to view your goods or services, and of course, a way for them to make purchases. Equally important, however, are tools that allow them to ask questions, make comments, learn more about your products, receive updates, and so on. If you're not providing the tools your clients require to do business with you, then you could be shooting yourself in the foot.

5. Ask for feedback. The best way to give your clients everything they want or need from your website is to go straight to the source and ask. So provide a forum for customers to make suggestions (and then try to implement them).

Sarah Danielson is a writer for SeaReach an asset protection company and manufacturer of asset marking and security printing solutions.

The Funnel Effect – Making Customers Buy

Wed, 23 Mar 2011 07:09:13 GMT

Well, I never thought selling can be so tough before I went ahead and started a business of my own. That was a while back but I never forget the lesson that customer is always right – even if he doesn’t buy a dollar’s worth from you. How you make a customer buy is mainly an art with some science and logic cementing the sales process. As regards a website, it is your store on the internet highway. The beauty of a website is that you can change things pretty fast to meet customer demand. An interesting part of this sales process is the funnel effect.

What is funnel effect?

Usually a customer drops-in on your website through the home page. Thereafter the customer is faced with several options. One of them is to pull out and exit. This would mean a waste of effort in getting him to the website in the first place. Obviously this has to be avoided which is easier said than done. The funnel effect is to design web pages in such a way that they engage the visitor. This can be done with persuasion. If a customer decides to exit despite your engagement he must be offered alternatives and options. This will enable you to suck him into the sales funnel. At this stage a prospective customer would explore other alternatives and choices rather than exit your website. The final stage of this funnel is to provide incentives and discounts. This option must not be cosmetic. Genuine bargains can never be ignored by people especially women. Providing the right incentive can tilt the balance towards a sale.

All roads lead to a sale

The design of a website should be such that whatever be the entry point of a visitor, he must be driven towards mouth of sales funnel. It is essential therefore to provide them with different and attractive offers on every page. This methodology has been successfully followed by many commercial websites. For example, ‘Deal of the day’, is an excellent funnel effect. By providing heavy discount on a specific product, you can drive massive amount of traffic to it. In practice, even visitors who are looking for other products get sucked into this funnel. Once again, the offer has to be genuine and must be striking. In one such experiment, a website sold 50000 pen drives in a matter of five hours. Obviously, visitors who never wanted a pen drive were pushed unwittingly into the sales funnel.

Conclusion

You must design a website in the form of a funnel. Visitors must be enticed to remain on your page and must be compelled to explore other products. In practice, a buyer would usually go for a product he initially intended to buy but 20% would end up buying some other stuff altogether. This 20% is what would make money for you. If you lose a visitor now, your chances of making him visit again are bleak. It must be your endeavor to make every visitor buy. The funnel effect is your best bet to make him buy.

This article has been written by Nitin Aggarwal, the owner and webmaster of Offshore Ally. He is one of the leading providers of virtual assistant and SEO link builders. He is interested in Internet marketing techniques and enjoys blogging. Connect with him via Twitter.

Selecting A Domain Name For Your Ecommerce Website

Sun, 04 Apr 2010 01:49:26 GMT

It All Starts with a Domain Name

Domain name selection is an important first step in the planning of your online business. Your domain name (or "Web address"), tells customers who you are and how to find you on the Internet. It is the core of your Internet identity and because no two parties can have the exact same Web address, it is totally unique to you. Often business owners are neglectful when considering the domain name for their online store. Be mindful that the consequences of selecting an ineffective domain can be just as devastating as selecting the wrong physical location were you to open a traditional brick-and-mortar store. So, as you sit down to consider your options, remember to think strategically. You should give at least as much thought to your domain name as you would the address of a physical retail location. As you perform your research, you’ll find that in today’s crowded market, finding a quality domain befitting your business can be extremely difficult and in some cases, very costly. Fortunately, there are still many valuable domain names out there if you think strategically. In this article, you will learn the most important considerations for identifying a powerful domain to represent your online store.

Domain names can essentially be broken into two categories:

Branded Domains – Typically sought by businesses that either already have an established brand or company name when they decide to launch their web presence or, businesses who plan to allocate significant resources toward promoting and advertising their brand name so that it becomes well-known and established. Some examples of branded domain names are: target.com, sears.com, expedia.com, amazon.com, itunes.com and newer brands who are currently making a significant marketing push (and are spending big money!) in order to build familiarity for their brand name such as: magicjack.com, kayak.com and etrade.com.

Keyword-Rich Domains – Are domain names that are selected based on keywords or phrases that describe a business or product and that have been identified as keyword terms that consumers are searching for in order to find a product or service. If you’re a new business, in a competitive market, want to ensure that you can compete for search-engine rankings and do not have the advertising budget to strongly promote your company or product name, you may want to consider a clever keyword-based domain name. Some examples of keyword-based domain names are; commercialmatsandrubber.com, motorcyclehelmetsandjackets.com, fireplaceessentials.com & coppersinks.com.

Choosing the right keyword-rich domain name will likely save you significant marketing dollars over the long run. Conversely, choosing a non-keyword rich domain name might be a mistake that is hard to overcome and could be a factor that leads to your business failing. To see an example of how important a keyword-rich domain name can be, go perform a Google-search on the phrase "copper sinks". You’ll notice that 6 of the top-ten results have either "copper" or "sinks" or both words in their actual domain name.

There are many factors that determine how well a Web site ranks in search engine results. Backward linking is perhaps the biggest. In fact, traditionally, if two Web sites are optimized equally, the number and quality of each site’s backward links will determine who ranks higher. Well, typically that is correct however a keyword-rich domain name can trump that theory. Let take a closer look at the results set for "copper sinks". The domain name www.coppersinks.com ranks #2 in Google (at the time that this article was authored) and has only 107 backward links (according to Yahoo) to their site. The domain name www.finecraftsimports.com ranks #3 and has 2,000 backward links (according to Yahoo) to their site.

This builds a very strong case that keyword-rich domain names are very important and can save you money. Why save you money? Well, building backward links can be very difficult and time consuming. Chances are that a site such as ‘finecraftsimports.com’ has paid an SEO firm thousands of dollars to obtain them backward links. Some companies pay tens of thousands for backward links to boost their search rankings. The fact that www.coppersinks.com beats www.finecraftsimports.com with only 107 backward link (compared to 2,000) is AMAZING and clearly illustrates the value of a keyword-rich domain name.

Researching a Good Keyword-Rich Domain Name

Start by creating a list of 10 search phrases that you think will generate relevant traffic to your site from search engines. Run these searches in Google and take notice of the domains that are coming up in the top five results, and if you see the same domain names coming up across several searches. The domains that appear in the top search results for several of your potential phrases will likely be your main competitors. We can learn from what they are doing.

Identify your (hypothetical) top three competitors, and write down the words in their "title tags," "meta descriptions" and "meta keywords" from their homepages (if you’re not sure what these refer to, look up these terms). You can see this information by right-clicking on the page and choosing "view source." The info will be toward the top of the page.

The keyword phrases that come out of this exercise will likely be the big phrases in your industry that people search for on a regular basis. Based on this information, further refine your list of keyword phrases.

Pairing Down Your Phrases

Now that you have a rough idea of phrases that you think will work and the phrases your competitors are targeting, it’s time to look at the data. There is a great (free) tool that lets you see how many searches are done each month for a given phrase. Try plugging your keywords into this powerful tool. It can be found at: https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal

Some choice phrases should start to jump out at you. Make a list of the 20 potential keyword phrases that are:

Generic enough to represent all of the products you will be offering
No more than 4-keywords long (preferably 2 or 3)
Seem memorable and not too awkward to speak or spell
Searched very frequently (800 plus times per month)
Include in your list, the number of times the phrase is searched for each month.

Finding out if Your Domain Name is Available

Now that you have a list of potential phrases that can be used for a domain name, you must search to see if they are available. You’ll want to find one with a .com extension, no other extensions are as strong (unless you are a legitimate .org). You can also use hyphens between words in your domain name. Hyphens will not make a difference to search engines and could help people delineate your name. A good place to check and see if a domain name is available is:

www.whois.com

Keep track of the available domain names in your list as you go. At the end of this process you will start finding some good potential domain names.

Consider Buying a Used Domain Name

Following your research, you could now easily choose one of the available domain names from your list and get started, but there is another option here and in order to make your decision, it’s important to know a few things about domain names. Google considers the age of the domain name (and its history) in its search algorithm. Old domain names rank higher than new domains. In the recent past there was a phenomenon called "the sand box effect." This describes the theory that new domain names will never rank for competitive phrases in the first 6-9 months of their existence. Another way of saying it is, "Google respects its elders" (elder domain names anyway). Domain names that were registered before the year 2000 have a very big advantage when it comes to ranking high in search results for competitive phrases. The industry calls these domain names "last millennium domains".

So, with all that said, you have the option to buy domain names that are already registered from individuals, businesses or domain name brokers. There are companies out there that actually buy domain names and develop them for aftermarket use by posting a basic site with relevant content and backward links. Purchasing one of these aftermarket domain names can short track your search marketing strategy and potentially save you money in the long run. You can expect to pay $350 and up for an aftermarket domain name. It can often be a good business decision to purchase the right domain name in the $350 – 2,000 price range when building a new site. It could save you 10k or more in marketing services over a few years.

How to Buy a Used Domain Name

There are a number of sites out there that sell/broker domain names. They handle all of the communication between buyer/seller and ensure that you get your domain and the seller gets their money.

Here are 3 sites you can use for purchasing aftermarket domain names:

Buying an Existing Site

What if you found the perfect domain name but it’s unavailable and you can’t find it on a broker site? There is still a chance that you can buy the site (and domain) out-right from the person or company that is currently using it. Try typing potential domains from your research list into a browser. You will find that some of the site’s that come up look as though they have not been kept up over the years or have been abandoned. The owner might consider a reasonable offer and not be aware of the actual value. However, don’t insult the Web site owner with offers of less than $1,000.

To get an idea of what the site might be worth to you consider the following:

Does the domain name contain a keyword phrase that is searched frequently (more than 800 times per month)?
Is the domain name at least 3-years old?
Is there currently content on the site that contains any keyword phrases you will be targeting?
Does the site have any backward links (quality links are very valuable)
Does the site come up in the waybackmachine (http://www.archive.org/web/web.php)? Do the old pages look legit?

If the answer is yes to 3 or more of the above items, the site would be worth at least $2,000. You can find the contact information for a domain name by doing a "whois" look up at: http://whois.domaintools.com. Generally you want to contact the person listed under "administrative contact". If you find someone who is willing to sell, you can use a service (http://whois.domaintools.com) to broker the deal for you.

Summing it All Up

Choosing the right domain name is a very important decision that can make or break the success of your online business. Take a week and do the research and then make an informed decision on the best domain name for your business. Don’t be afraid to spend some money for the right domain, consider it an investment that will make all future SEO endeavors more effective. Seek council with a trusted adviser (someone with knowledge on the subject) and share your research with them. After all, you will be building on this foundation for years to come.

AUTHOR BIO

The company’s proprietary eCommerce management platform, known as "Mountain Commerce" boasts the top ecommerce features in the industry and was named to Practical eCommerce magazine’s list of notable shopping cart solutions in late 2007. Additionally, the company offers a full compliment of commercial Web services and ecommerce solutions such as Search Engine Marketing, Graphic Design, Web Hosting and Merchant Services.

Learn more at: http://www.mountainmedia.com

eCommerce Website Development Tips

Wed, 28 Oct 2009 03:33:46 GMT

As the Founder of an ecommerce development company, I have seen and been involved with perhaps hundreds of ecommerce Web site projects. In my experience, I find that clients tend to put more of an emphasis on increasing traffic to their site in order to generate sales rather than taking steps to improve the site to increase conversion (ie. turn those visitors into buyers!). It’s a fact that you can often improve sales exponentially by simply making some minor site modifications and avoiding some common mistakes. Online merchants are all too familiar with the concept of optimizing their site for search engines to get more traffic but they also need to think about optimizing their site for humans to get more purchases.

Recently, my firm made a series of changes to a client’s Web site to improve conversion rates. The merchant was averaging about 940 visitors a day and closing about 3-5 sales a week. Sales increased over 300% percent in the 10-days that followed the release of the new site which we had optimized compared with the previous 10-days. Even though this was a small merchant, 300% growth has potential to have a very positive impact on a business.

This article will offer ecommerce website development tips that will help you improve conversion rates for your Web site. Don’t get me wrong, sites need traffic and search engine optimization is of fundamental importance. However, if you are going to work that hard to get traffic, it would be wise to optimize your site for conversion as well. Try these simple measures and let me know how they work out.

Getting the Masthead Right

The masthead is the graphic at the top of a Web site. It should be clean and incorporate the following:

The masthead should be 120 pixels high and 1000 pixels wide
Contain a logo and slogan (keep the logo small)
1-800 number (or local phone number if you don’t have a toll-free)
Utility links
Site search box

The masthead should be “high and tight,” no more than 120 pixels high. 100-pixels is preferred. This will allow more products to be seen “above the fold” in a shopper’s browser further down the page. Shoppers actually mentally block out the information in the masthead and only look there when they need certain types of information like a phone number or a link to the basket or policies page. This is not the place to stroke your ego with a big logo and bloated graphics. It should be all business. Think of the site design, masthead, navigation and footer as a shopping interface. It’s all about ergonomics and usability. Don’t have the graphics from your interface competing with messaging and product images. A toned down interface will make your products and messaging jump off the page.

This is not my opinion; it is the evolution of the ecommerce interface. Take a look at the mastheads of all the leading ecommerce sites for examples, Macys.com, Target.com, Homedepot.com. They are all “high and tight” have a small logo, do not contain bloated graphics and do contain the bullet points listed above.

Your toll-free number should be prominently placed in the masthead and include some verbiage like; “For Customer Services call: 1800 555-1212.” This number gives shoppers confidence that you can be reached if they have a problem with a purchase.

Most ecommerce Web sites have what I call a “utility navigation” which includes links to ecommerce functions like “My Account, View Cart, and Check Out”. This is also a great place to include a link to you policies, Wish List, Gift Certificates and Contact Us. Keep the font small 10 pt verdana works nice. Some designers use icons for these link which can add to the site’s visual appeal. Personally, I like text links. They load faster and avoid confusion.

Integrating a site search into the masthead is a common practice. Shoppers expect it to be there consistently on all pages of the site. Include this feature even if you don’t have a big product catalog. This, and the other elements mentioned above will give your site a professional appearance and help build confidence in your shoppers.

Homepage Ad and Messaging

It is critical to let your visitors know what your site is all about at a glance. The center of your homepage should contain a distilled general message (6-8 words). This message should take some time to get right. Come up with some ideas and share it with the rest of your staff or friends, sleep on it, refine it, take time to get it right. Find the right supporting image from a site like www.istock.com. Be sure to purchase the proper license. Stock photography sites have been on a rampage lately suing site owners who use unlicensed images. This is where you need to get creative; it would be a good idea to enlist a graphic designer to ensure your ad is professional. Try to limit the ad size to be 250 pixels high and the full width of the site. You want to conserve vertical space so you can fit a row of products below your homepage ad and above the fold (visible without scrolling).

Finding the Right Balance for Your Navigation

The navigation system is a critical component of a Web site. It should be very clean from a design standpoint. Avoid unnecessary graphics, buttons and roll-overs; they will only get in the way of search engines and customers. Search engines view the navigation system as the site’s foundation. It is literally an information hierarchy and will have a major impact on the site’s search engine visibility. Carefully plan your navigation system to include the phrase that you are targeting in the search engine optimization strategy.

It is important to find the right balance for the top-level categories in your navigation. Too many top-level categories will overwhelm shoppers and potentially lead to product list pages that have too few products in them. Try limiting your top-level categories to 12-15 categories.

Fewer categories will leave room for other important elements that shoppers expect to see under the navigation. Items that you should place under your navigation; SSL Logo, the payment methods you offer (graphics of credit cards, etc.), Your Free shipping offer, and logo from your payment gateway and you PCI scanning services. These items add legitimacy to your site and make shoppers feel secure.

SEO Footer
SEO footers are appearing on more and more sites. They provide a great way of separating out information pages from your product catalog. You want your main navigation to contain links to product pages only. Don’t distract your shoppers by mixing in pages like “about us” etc. The SEO footer provides a great place for your SEO and informational pages. For an example of an SEO footer visit; cremationsolutions.com.

Free Shipping Offers

Studies show that free shipping offers have a major impact on Internet shoppers and helps to increase sales. If you offer a free shipping incentive make sure it is highly visible in three places; the masthead, under the navigation, and on the product detail page next to the add-to-basket button. Recently, I was able to improve the visibility of a merchant’s free shipping offer (free shipping on orders over $75.00) by placing it under the navigation and on the product detail page near the buy button. The number of orders grew 15% the next week.

Now We’re Shopping
When visitors browse your ecommerce site they want to see product, and lots of it. Make sure your product list views contain 3-5 columns per product row. If possible, show 30 to 40 product thumbnail images per page. This will allow the shopper to easily browse through your selection and have a better shopping experience.

Resources

Visit these helpful resources for additional information about:

Doing Business on the Internet

eCommerce Website Development Tips

Author Bio

James Curley is the co-founder and Chief Executive Officer of Mountain Media, an ecommerce solution provider and web development company located in Saratoga Springs, NY.

Known as a pioneer in the ecommerce field, Curley led the company to produce one of the Web’s first ecommerce development platforms, “Mountain Commerce” in 1998. Since then, the platform has continued to evolve in order to meet new feature standards and industry trends and was named to Practical Ecommerce Magazine’s list of “Notable Shopping Carts” in 2007.

Use Your Own Affiliate Program

Sun, 06 Dec 2009 04:32:22 GMT

"If you don't drive your business, you will be driven out of business." (B. C. Forbes)

A lot of people are doing this mistake, they let themselves be driven out of business. How? By starting a business and just hope that it will work. It’s the same with the owners of e-commerce websites.

Why do I say this? Because most of them they are just presenting their products but they are not selling them. As usual, you don’t have to reinvent the wheel, the solutions is in front of you.

The easiest way to increase your sites visibility and to “drive” visitors to your business is by advertising.

Traditional online advertising like CPC or CPM offers you the advantage of increasing your traffic, but not in the best way. You will pay for clicks and for impressions but who knows what you will receive. You just know for sure that you will pay.

The other way, is to use your own affiliate program. You will pay, but you will pay only for sales, not for impressions or clicks. In other words, pay less and receive more.

Why do you think big players like amazon.com have their own affiliate programs? Because they know how to drive their business. More affiliates, more sales, better business.

The alternative? SEO, advertising, and luck. Advertising can be expensive as we’ve discussed. Let’s think a little about SEO. It’s good to be SEO optimized, but I don’t think you would like to put all your chances on Google, Bing or Yahoo. Everyone knows that having a single source of visitors is risky, and you can have a surprise in one morning when you wake up and they’ve changed their algorithm. If you are driving your business based on luck, you don’t have a business.

Let’s talk a little about affiliate’s advantages.

From my experience as a publisher and affiliate, I can say that I prefer to use affiliate programs instead of advertising. I think the biggest problem in using advertising is that there is a store owner, and there is publisher as a third player. This third player is usually the one who delivers the advertisement, e.g. Google Adsense, AdBrite, Clicksor and others. From my point of view as a publisher, I don’t like this because I don’t know exactly how much money the store owner is paying for advertisement and how much money I receive and how much money the third party receives. From my point of view as affiliate, I like this because I receive a fixed percent from the sales, so I know how much money I’ve generated for the store owner and I know I was paid correctly.

It’s in your power to convince the owners of other websites about the advantages of becoming your affiliate and to drive your business.

Ionut Lupu

Virtue Affiliate, www.avaffiliate.com

Reducing and Capitalizing on Shopping Cart Abandonment

Thu, 13 Aug 2009 07:20:09 GMT

As e-tailers, we all know too well how many shopping cart abandonments happen on a day-to-day basis. Those are actual people who have put an item from our website in their cart as a sign and interest and BOOM…they disappear. To another website they go and perform the same task or actually purchase an item.

According to an e-tailing group survey, “nearly 60% of U.S. online retailers experience cart abandonment rates of over 20%,” reports e-Marketer. A study by PayPal and comScore, “found 45% of US online shoppers had abandoned shopping carts multiple times in just three weeks.

Most importantly from the merchants’ point of view, the average cost of abandoned goods in those shopping carts was $109.

In the same study, 46% of online shoppers said high shipping charges were a ‘very important reason’ for emptying carts.”

In this particular study, other reasons for shopping cart abandonment were:

Wanted to comparison shop: 37%
Lack of money: 36%
Wanted to look for a coupon: 27%
Wanted to shop offline: 26%
Couldn’t find preferred pay option: 24%
Item unavailable at checkout: 23%
Couldn’t find customer support: 22%
Security concerns: 21%

So, how can we as merchants improve our shopping cart abandonment rates? First, you must use a platform in which the data allows for you to actually contact some of these shoppers and it all starts with them creating accounts on your website.

When a shopper creates an account on your website that means you have captured that shoppers data such as a name and a phone number or email. You can go through shopping cart abandonment data daily, or once every two days, see what shoppers with accounts have abandoned their cart and you can choose to email them or call them.

The best results from this strategy I have personally seen have come from emailing or calling these customers and offering them a 5-10% coupon off their purchase.

Also, some tips from reasons stated by the research by PayPal and comScore are:

Offer coupons: In this economy, shoppers are really looking to spend as least as possible and really looking for coupon codes online.
Phone number: Make sure you have a phone number where customers can reach you. Often times shoppers feel unsecured when they don’t see they can talk to a live person and may move on right there and then.
Pay Options: Offer as many payment options as possible. That includes all types of credit cards, PayPal, Google Checkout, and Bill Me Later if you qualify.
Customer Support: This can go hand in hand with the phone number issue but make LIVE CHAT and a PHONE NUMBER prominent to the shopper. Make sure they know how to contact you and make it readily available for them.

Pablo Palatnik heads the Marketing Department at Fortune3, a Shopping Cart Software Company based out of Doral, Florida.

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.

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.

Creating Easy to Use Shopping Carts

Thu, 09 Jun 2005 00:00:00 GMT

Shopping cart abandonment – where a customer drops out part way through a purchase - is a common problem for merchants. Statistics show that most shopping cart abandonments happen because it was not user friendly enough for the customer. Customer usability is a must, and should be a large factor when you are determining which shopping cart is right for your business. You’ve probably been shopping yourself where you gave up in sheer frustration.

In most cases, the developer of the shopping cart system will have a demo shopping cart set up. Try out that demo, and view it from a customer's perspective, as well as an administrators perspective. A key feature to look for in terms of customer usability, is clear direction. Will the customer easily know what to do next? Once they add an item to the shopping cart, will they easily see the option to keep shopping, or to check out? Is searching for products easy? If possible, have someone who isn't computer savvy test the demo, and get their opinion of it.

Your online shopping cart pages should be easy to navigate. If your customer can’t figure out how to get from one page to the next, you will lose them. Furthermore, the pages need to load quickly, so no large images or flash on your site. The ability to suggest cross sell or add-on products may increase sales as well as provide useful information to your customers. It may say something to the effect of "Customers who purchased product A, also purchased product B, C, and D."

Your customer should not be required to have any special programs installed or turned on, such as flash or JavaScript. Some customers won't even understand what these things are, and requiring them makes your shopping cart unusable by many – statistics show as many as 10% of users don’t have these enabled. If a customer cannot figure out how to use your shopping cart, it won't matter how interactive or pretty it is.

Availability of products should be clearly noted, as soon as the product page loads. You will lose a customer for life if they go all the way through the shopping process, and the checkout process, only to discover that the product they wanted is unavailable, or that it must be back ordered. Also, each time your customer interacts with the shopping cart, they should be made aware that their action was noted. This will prevent the customer from performing the same action - over and over - in frustration.

Customers should know what their payment options will be before they start adding products to their cart. It’s frustrating to go through the selection process, only to get to the checkout and are not able to pay using the options listed. Make the options clear from the very beginning.

Finally, the actual checkout process must be user friendly. This is where the majority of the shopping cart abandonments occur. The checkout process should only be used to get the customers shipping information, and billing information. People don't like to share their information, and asking for too much information, along with billing information will most likely cost you sales.

The more user friendly your shopping cart is, the more positive your customers shopping experience will be. If you made it a good experience, the customer will probably return to buy more from you in the future.

Your Web host and your Shopping Carts: Friend or Foe?

Thu, 09 Jun 2005 00:00:00 GMT

When choosing shopping cart software, you will need to take your web host into consideration. You do not want to purchase shopping cart software until you know for sure that it is compatible with your web host servers, and that you will be able to set it up on the server. Making your purchase without having the proper information is not advised.

Many webhosts offer free shopping carts. You should thoroughly check out the features to make sure it’s a suitable shopping cart – you often get what you pay for. You should note two things about using the shopping cart provided by your web host. First, if you need to change hosts, the shopping cart may not easily move with you. Second, in most cases, your web host will not offer support for the shopping cart. They generally only offer support for the webhosting.

If you have decided that the shopping cart offered by your web host is not for you, your search is just beginning, and www.shopping-cart-reviews.com can help you with that search. You will need to know several things about your web host while conducting your search, such as whether your website is hosted on a linux or windows server. Contact your web host to find out the information about the server. You should also ask about having SSL set up on your account, this is often required by the shopping cart. Sometimes there is an additional monthly fee for enabling SSL.

Find out what technology (ASP, PHP, CGI, ASP.NET, etc) are supported and which database (MySQL, SQL Server, Access, etc), and if applicable, what versions. Most shopping cart software will require at least one of each of these to be available. Armed with that list of technologies from your web host, you can use that to search on this site and make a short list.

Make sure that you want to use your current web host for your ecommerce activities before setting up your shopping cart. If they are not using the most up-to-date software for their servers and operating systems, you need to find a new host.

By communicating with your web host during your shopping cart selection process, you will avoid many problems that could occur after your purchase. If your web host is uncommunicative, you should look for a new host. If they cannot communicate with you to help ensure that you purchase the right shopping cart software, they probably won't be very communicative when you run into website related problems later on.

An Indepth Look at Ashop Commerce

Wed, 11 Jan 2012 04:18:59 GMT

Ashop Commerce, while maybe new to some, has been around for quite a few years in their homeland, Australia. A major reworking of the product has seen them go global with impressive expansion plans.

Initial Impressions

Ashop is doing a great job of keeping up with the changing nature of the industry. Out of the box, as well as the normal front end and admin section, you get a mobile version and a Facebook store. This is a great way to open new opportunities and reach new customers easily. With mobile traffic sitting around 10% and growing it’s foolish to ignore the mobile consumer. Even if they don’t buy on the mobile device, they might research there and buy later.

The site is super easy to use and setting up a new store is a breeze. I managed to get a site set up with shipping, accepting payments, a theme I selected, a logo uploaded and a product created in about 5 minutes. I’m in business!

The admin interface is very clean and easy to use.

Setting up & Managing Products

For most shop owners, setting up and managing products is an ongoing chore. Fortunately, creating a new product is pretty straight forward. There are quite a few fields available to fill in, but many of them are optional. Having the extra fields there gives you extra flexibility when you need it. Apart from the expected fields (name, description, price, etc), there’s more advanced ones such as B2B price, quantity discounts, support for digital goods and more.

Speaking of quantity discounts, there’s a neat rules engine for applying discounts to quantity purchases. If you want, for example, 5% off for 3 – 5 items, 10% off for 6 – 10 and 20% off for 11+ items, no problem. There is also a similar system for managing variants on goods – sizes, colors, etc.

Payment, Shipping and Taxes

These are features that are boring until they don’t work at which point they are the worst things in the world. Fortunately you are well catered for. There’s a wide range of payment gateways supported featuring the usual suspects, and even allowance for a surcharge for each different card type. The tax settings seemed flexible but a bit confusing compared to other setups I’ve seen. Shipping supports real time lookup of many major shipping providers, allowing you to workout real time pricing from Fedex, etc.

Skinning

People love to design! People usually spend, in my experience, a disproportionately large effort on design. With many shopping cart products, you need to hire a designer and then a programmer to implement the design. A few thousand dollars later and you have your design. They usually have some built in themes to choose from, but customising them requires some programming or at least CSS knowledge.

Ashop has a nice interface where you can drag and drop and change design with no code.

You start with one of the built in themes, there are roughly 70 to choose from. From there, you can literally drag and drop components around the page to where you want them, and then use an editor to change colors, etc.

If you are super picky about what you want it to look like, or time poor, you can have a totally custom design made by Ashop at various prices depending on your needs from $1,295 up. The templates plus drag and drop should suffice for most.

Marketing Tools

“Build it and they will come” makes a nice line for a movie, but for a website, that’s rarely true. You need to bring people to you. Marketing tools help with this. While good marketing involves a lot more than tools, they certainly help make life much easier.

Affiliates

Ashop has its own built in affiliates program. This makes setting up an affiliates program very easy. There’s pros and cons between using your own program versus going through a 3^rd party system such as Commission Junction, etc, but if you want your own program, having it already integrated makes it very quick and simple to setup.

Search Engines

Ashop has a built in module that allows it to send all your products to Google AdWords. This is a fantastic feature as it allows you to setup AdWords campaigns without leaving Ashop.

Other Marketing Tools

There are a range of tools such as:

Gift certificates which allows a fair bit of customisation – can make your own design, limit to categories or products, etc.
A built in newsletter tool which offers some basic targeting features
Already set up feeds to ready to send to shopping.com, Google shopping, etc
A non-reciprocal link swap function with 5 other non-competitive Ashop sites. This allows you to automatically get links with 5 other stores on the Ashop platform, which can help with your SEO.

Reporting

There are two main reports. Order Reports gives you, as you’d expect, information on orders placed. This can be broken up in several useful ways – overall orders, by product, by customer, etc.

Statistics gives you more general information. It gives you information on visitors, search engines, where people come from, countries, and more.

The information overall is good, but doesn’t replace something like Google Analytics, although Ashop does allow you to easily integrate with Google Analytics if you want that extra data.

Conclusion

Ashop Commerce seems to be squarely aimed at the sort of person who wants to get online fast and start selling. For the sophisticated and experienced online marketer, Ashop probably isn’t the best choice. However, if you want to get online, have all the options you need to run a successful online business, don’t want to have too steep of a learning curve, and are more interested in getting stuff sold quickly, Ashop is a serious contender.

Review as at January 2012.

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 Ashop Commerce. 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.

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 somewhat 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).

A detailed review of VP-ASP 7.0

Fri, 30 Jul 2010 00:00:00 GMT

Introduction

VP-ASP Cart is made by Australian company Rocksalt. They are a veteran of the shopping cart industry, with 10 years history and their product in version 7. VP-ASP is the first shopping cart I ever tried, back in 2002. It was that process of selecting a cart that lead to this site. Obviously VP-ASP has come a long way since then.

Initial Impressions

VP-ASP still bears a resemblance to the product I saw years ago. For comprehensiveness of features, you’d need to look a while to find something more complete than VP-ASP. Having been around so long, there’s been plenty of time to add bells and whistles other products haven’t had time to make yet.

Setting Up & Managing Products

There is an almost intimidating range of product options to configure. Advanced features like uploadable customer images (presumably for customizable goods), an RMA system where you can configure the RMA allowed days per product, flexible multiple payment options (eg $50/month for 3 months), and more. Want to sell a bundle of a suit with 2 shirts? No problem. This sort of advanced functionality is the strength of VP-ASP.

There are some strange default settings, such as not having product pages by default - you need to turn them on otherwise products only appear in a category page. Even when you turn them on, the product title on the category pages isn’t clickable, a small “click to see more” link gets you to the product pages. While minor to change, it seems an odd default.

Payment, Shipping & Taxes

VP-ASP Cart supports an enormous array of payment gateways - over 100, including some I’ve never heard of (including native Norwegian and Greek amongst others!). It only supports PayPal out of the box, but you can download others easily from their website. Three gateways of your choosing are included free, more requires payment. It shouldn’t be a problem as most people only use a few.

Likewise, shipping is comprehensive. Shipping prices can be fixed, based on weight, number of items, pre-determined per item cost, and other combinations I can’t imagine.

Apparently tax is also quite configurable, and both the product and the website talk about downloadable tax modules. I looked and looked and couldn’t work out how to download them, a little perplexing.

Checking Out

VP-ASP does have support for guest checkout, although it’s off by default. Guest checkout has been shown repeatedly to increase conversions, so it’s good to turn this on. The checkout process is quite simple and straight forward, and gives users clear guidance as to where they are in the checkout process. Apparently a one page checkout is in the works.

Skinning

A range of skins is available for purchase at around $US95 each. These templates don’t change the layout (which is definable as 2 or 3 columns), but mostly just the color scheme. If you want a different layout, you’ll need to code this yourself. Tweaking the HTML and CSS is easy via the admin interface.

The templates are pretty straight forward. For example, to change the product <span class="productinfolabel">[getlang LangProductRetailPrice]</span>

Marketing Tools

Promotional tools include quantity discounts, group discounts, coupon codes, and customer discounts. Parts of the interface are less friendly than I’m used to.

For example, to create a quantity discount, you click “Add a Record”, then have to know the catalogid of the product - no search, autocomplete, drop down, etc. This experience, while functional, increases training time and frustration for less experienced users.

Other functions include:

Cross selling
Upsells in shopping cart
Embed of videos into product pages
Multilingual/multicurrency
Gift certificates
Featured products module
Affiliates module

There doesn’t appear to be any newsletter functionality, but you can collect email addresses and export them easily.

More expensive versions of VP-ASP include an “SEO Toolkit”, or it can be purchased separately for $195. In my opinion, SEO friendliness should be mandatory. Natural search traffic makes up around 70% of traffic for most ecommerce stores, so SEO is critical. VP-ASP has excellent support for the sitemap.xml format. I find it odd that not all shopping carts have this as technically it’s relatively easy to implement.

Security

VP-ASP places strong emphasis on security. It’s PCI compliant, which many carts still aren’t. There’s many other small features which contribute to the tight security of the product. Double password admin login, a setup procedure which emphasises security best practice, and more. They even offer a security audit service for $295, which I’ve never seen from any vendor.

Reporting

Reports include:

Sales reports
Product reports
Stock reports
Search term reports (I love this function)
Recurring billing reports

On top of this there is a query tool which allows you to do pretty much any report you can imagine, but it’s not for the faint of heart.

Support

VP-ASP Cart uses a paid support system. You get a certain number of support points free with the product, and after that can top up by buying extra points. I needed support at one point during my trial, and received a response within a few hours on a Saturday evening!

There is also a knowledge base and a fairly comprehensive collection of tutorial videos.

Other Features

Listing all the features of the product would take pages. A few other select features include:

Drop shipping support
Gift registry
Loyalty points system
Support for digital goods
A blog

And many more.

Conclusion

VP-ASP’s strength is its depth and breath of features. The feature set is so broad that it can take quite a while to wrap your head around it, and I’d expect to be spending quite a bit of time setting up and experimenting.

The weakness is the UI which is not as friendly as it could be and is not as intuitive as other products I’ve seen. Inexperienced users may find it intimidating, but those with some technical background will likely adapt quickly.

Feb 2011: since this review was written, a new upgrade has been released with an impressive collection of new features.

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.

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)

Note: about a year after this review was written, the author accepted a job at AmeriCommerce. This is noted here to provide full transparency

A Review of Magento

Wed, 09 Sep 2009 04:27:00 GMT

What is Magento?

Magento is an open source ecommerce platform, produced by a team of developers who go by the name Verian. Unlike most other open source ecommerce solutions, Magento was designed from the ground up to be secure, robust, scalable and search engine friendly. In fact, Magento is possibly the only open source shopping cart, which was designed from scratch, as opposed to evolving as a development fork from another software product. Magento was a long time in development, and much was expected of this package upon release, so how do things shape up now that Magento has been available for some time? Is it really as good as it was supposed to be, or was it mostly hype? Read on and find out.

Under the Hood

Magento uses the usual PHP and MySQL setup, making it suitable for use on even the most budget of hosting solutions. However, if you need secure (HTTPS) commerce, then make sure your host can provide such services. If Magento uses such a tried and tested (and some would say old) technology platform, why is it considered so cutting edge? Quite simply, Magento goes above and beyond every other free shopping cart out there. Offering an entirely modular system, which can be used for vending anything. The backend is rather daunting at first, Magento comes with a full range of ecommerce features, this really is not a shopping cart for the feint hearted. However steep the learning curve is, it is entirely worthwhile, as choosing Magento as your shopping cart will mean you will never have to change your software down the line, as you find your current solution lacking. Magento does it all, it does it well, but it is not simple for the newcomer to ecommerce. Nowhere is this more in evidence than in getting your catalogue onto your home page. Out of the box, Magento does not do this. Other ecommerce packages will automatically produce a storefront, based upon your product catalogue. Magento does not do this; instead, it aims to be a catalogue management system, with complete flexibility. Setting up and Magento page will require the user to have some knowledge of HTML. Magento leaves it up to the user to make things look pretty, do not expect setup wizards and automatically generated code here. The trade off is that Magento is really the most powerful open source ecommerce platform out there. Nevertheless, nothing is for free; you will need to spend time and effort to get your store online. In fact, it is highly likely that it would be more cost effective to contract a third party expert to take care of the store setup for you.

Magento in Action

Once you have setup a Magento store (which is not an easy thing to do without professional help), your ecommerce site will outperform just about any other ecommerce platform. Speed wise, Magento has been optimised in the extreme, page loads are fast, database queries are made at lightning speed. All of this is rendered in HTML very quickly, using standards compliant code. Let us take a step back here for a moment. Magento was never marketed as an out-of-the-box solution that could be set up in hours. It was marketed as a state of the art open source ecommerce platform, which would become a serious contender in the market. It outperforms every other open source solution in every way, and most of the paid solutions. As a shopping experience, when set up properly, it is supreme, but do not come here looking for an eight hour ecommerce site setup. Magento has never proposed to do this. Comparing Magento with the likes of osCommerce and other open source shopping carts is a futile exercise. Magento takes over where these old, imperfect solutions leave off. However, with a cost, and that cost is the effort required to set it up.

Magento in Summary

If you are a business looking for a serious ecomme4rce solution, which will not cost thousands of dollars to implement, then Magento is for you. If you are a dabbler, sitting at home looking to set up an ecommerce site to sell a limited range of goods that may or may not turn a profit, then look elsewhere. Magento is for professional corporate use, and requires an amount of investment in resources to implement successfully. However, if you want the very best in open source, and have a few hundred dollars to invest, Magento is the best solution available. Magento outperforms every other open source shopping platform in every way, and by a huge measure. Magento is open source meets corporate software. Used correctly, and with due diligence, it is an ecommerce platform that can service your business for a very long time to come.

Written by Raine from Rubik Integration. The article reflects the opinion of the author, and not necessarily of Shopping Cart Reviews.

Interspire Shopping Cart Review

Thu, 25 Sep 2008 06:37:23 GMT

Introduction

Interspire Shopping Cart is made by Australian Company Interspire. Interspire make several web products, e.g., a CMS and email marketing software. Their shopping cart product is, despite the version 3 tag, quite new, but has more maturity than many far more established shopping carts. It comes in three versions: starter, professional and ultimate. You can find a features comparison table on their site. I tested 3.6.2 Ultimate.

In the interests of disclosure, I have used this product on a client's site.

Initial Impressions

Interspire has the slickest back end I've seen. Someone has obviously put some thought and likely some research into how to structure it. The things you use all the time are in your face, those you use less often are a little more hidden but still quite accessible.

You are greeted by a flash based dashboard, which shows you key statistics for your shop over the last 7 days. A minor quibble is that it uses the same scale for visitors and orders. With most stores converting around 1 - 3% of visitors, it's going to be very hard to see the orders and conversion rate numbers next to the unique visitors. The numbers do popup when you mouse over the day, so you aren't reliant on the graph alone.

Administration home page

Setting up & Managing Products

One word comes up again: slick. You'll be seeing a lot of that throughout this article. This product has a lot of polish and really focusses on the needs of the shop owner. Adding a product is simple and painless. The key features are on the homepage. More advanced features such as product variations are on easy to access tabs. A particularly impressive feature which I've only seen once before (on Magento, whose implementation was amateur compared to this) is the ability to choose a unique template for a product. Most of your products are probably fine on one template, but if you have for example, a promotion on certain products, you could create a special template with whatever different formatting and features you wanted. The same applies to category pages.

Product setup

The main product categories page is to die for. While it looks similar to others - a nested list of all your categories - you can rearrange categories simply by dragging and dropping with your mouse, and that's it. Much of the backend is done using AJAX and DHTML type functions, making common jobs very quick and easy. Very slick.

Interspire does product variations, allowing you to have variations such as size, color, etc. As is becoming more common amongst the better products on the market, and not before time, is the ability to handle stock levels at a variation level, so you can have 2 large shirts and 4 medium shirts in stock. It also allows pricing variations such as making extra large shirts $5 more.

There's lots of other nice touches, such as support for brands, purchase cost, and so on.

Search

A lot of products don't pay much attention to site search, but Interspire isn't one of them. Some of the site search options include putting site search specific keywords (as opposed to general meta keywords) in for products. This allows you to "rig" the search results, or modify for common customer mistakes. Speaking of which, there are good search reporting facilities including popular searches and popular searches with no results (your customers are telling you they want something!).

The front end search box has a nifty AJAX search suggestion function (similar to Google suggest). As you type in your search query, results are shown that get refined as you continue to type. The results even show thumbnail images! I'm not sure what this does for sales, but it impressed me.

Payment, Shipping & Taxes

Interspire has a long list of supported gateways, with a lot more coming in the next version. The shipping handles multiple countries and/or regions very well, even allowing you to enter zipcode/postcode level shipping options.

The tax options are fairly thorough. Apparently Canadians struggle with taxation in the current version, but they will supposedly be supported in the next one.

Checking Out

Interspire has a choice between one page checkout or regular checkout. The one page checkout is very slick, the best I've seen. Unfortunately in some tests I ran, the one page checkout hurt sales, and so I am using the regular checkout on my client's site. Your mileage may vary, every shop is different, but it's definitely worth testing.

They also have the choice between guest checkout and registered checkout, a definite sales booster.

Skinning

Of all the impressive features in Interspire shopping cart, this one takes the cake. First of all, there is a wide range of templates available. These don't come preinstalled but can be previewed and then installed seamlessly with literally one mouse click. The standard of the templates is fairly high. There is even a simple but effective logo creation tool built in.

A view of templates available to install

Modifying the template is a dream. You really have to experience it. You put the store into "design mode" through the back end, and then go to the front end and simply move things about. Want the "related products" on the left instead of the right? Just drag it there. It's really that simple. If you want to change the name from "Related Products" to "Other Products", just click on it and change it. If there are more detailed changes you want to make, just right click on it and select edit, and you can start editing the very simple and well structured HTML template files and CSS using the web based editor. I have found changing the templates to be in almost all cases very simple and straight forward.

Editing the skin in design mode. Note the right click menu on the right.

Marketing tools

Discounts

Marketing tools is possibly the weak link at the moment. The tools currently available are usable but fairly basic. On offer is a basic percentage or amount off with expiry date, usage limit, and category restriction. When mentioning this to Interspire I have been told "you just wait till the next version", so I'm waiting!

Creating discount coupons

Emails

Interspire have made an interesting decision to not include any bulk emailing features into the software (although the do support capturing email addresses). Some may say this is through avarice, as they also sell bulk emailing software, and conveniently include hooks into it. Personally, I think this is a sensible decision. Bulk email is something that seems very simple on the surface but is deceptively hard to do well (I have been involved in the development of an enterprise bulk mail system), and I have long recommended my clients use a 3rd party email service. As always, I recommend you sign up for one of the many excellent bulk email services, or pay to get the Interspire bulk email software.

Other marketing tools

Interspire has a feature I've never seen before - "Banners". This allows you to put a message at the top or bottom of the homepage, brand page, category page or search results. This could be a "10% off Brand X this month only", an image, or whatever you want. As a wonderful extra touch, you can set the expiry date on banners, so when the promotion is finished the banner finishes as well - no need to stay up till midnight.

They also have a well thought out gift certificates implementation. You can create different themed certificates, e.g., birthday, Christmas, wedding, etc, so the purchaser can choose the most relevant theme (which you can design, or use the built in designs) and print it themselves. You can also set whether you want fixed dollar amounts available, or if the purchaser can do any amount. Customer reviews are also available.

Reporting

Interspire has a good collection of reports. Their presentation is certainly above average, using some fancy flash charting technology to make sure they look extra nice. The reports available are:

Overview - sales, orders, conversion rate
Top 20 customers
Best selling products
Order locations (with nice Google Maps integration)
Orders by items sold
Orders by revenue - work out your most common order size
Product overview - a group of product statistics
Most popular products by views
Inventory report
Revenue by customer
As previously mentioned, search statistics

Most of the reports above can be filtered by date.

Extensibility

One of the biggest expenses for most shop owners is the cost of customisation. Some products are a nightmare to customise so you save a few hundred dollars up front and end up paying thousands in developer fees or lost time. Interspire ranks pretty well. As far as skinning goes, it's by a long shot the easiest yet. As far as deeper functionality, you will need solid PHP skills. The code is neat and well structured. It doesn't use any 3rd party frameworks (Zend, CakePHP, Smarty, etc), but uses their own in-house system. Any competent PHP developer should, with a bit of orientation, do just fine.

There is a concept of "add ons" but provision of these seems to be restricted to Interspire.

Support

The product includes 3 months free support, and paid support is available after that at a reasonable price. I have always preferred this model as it is sustainable for the company, and means you aren't relying on the goodwill of the developers to support you. I used support on a few occasions. Responses were generally received within 24 hours and were helpful. In one case, the engineer went above and beyond the call of duty and fixed something that was mostly my fault. In one critical incident, it did take 48 hours for my first response, which I wasn't too pleased with.

Other features

Another feature I've never seen before is the ability to integrate third party tools. Many shopping carts use Google Analytics, an affiliates tracking system, and a live chat system. Normally, it would take at least an hour or two of hacking into footer files, header files, checkout completion files, etc to get these working. Interspire have taking the sensible approach of saying: most people do it, why not make it easy? So, all those things can be setup from the backend without touching code. I installed a new affiliate tracking system in about 5 minutes.

There is also a returns system and a messaging system, allowing you to communicate with your customers via the site.

The customer wish list is nicely done, and a particularly nice feature is the ability for customers to make their wish lists public and share them with friends. This could possible double as a bridal registry.

Conclusion

Interspire Shopping Cart is a product to seriously consider. The company seems to have a great, customer focussed culture. They have, in theory, a release every 8 weeks. I haven't witnessed this so not sure how accurate it is, but even as a goal it's admirable. They also claim new features and developments are determined or heavily influenced by customer suggestions, this is true from what I've seen.

With their focus on creating a polished, reliable easy to use product, I can see myself coming back for more.

A detailed review takes significant time. The cost of time was partially offset by a payment from Interspire. No pressure direct or indirect was put on me for future work, kick backs or other incentives. Payment was received before they saw the review. They thoroughly respect and value the independent nature of this site.

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.

Why Pushing the Brand of your Online Shop is Essential to Achieving Monetary Success

Sun, 21 Aug 2011 03:11:22 GMT

You have probably heard a lot about the way branding, or creating a recognizable product or service identity is an important part of becoming successful in the business arena. This applies as much to an ordinary business as an online one, but it has special relevance from an online perspective. Online shops and vendors of various sorts really need to create a clear and recognizable brand with which customers can associate a product or service. The plethora of websites and marketing online make this an especially important area to take care of. The following are some reasons why creating a brand and publicizing it is so critical to success of an online shop:

It Delivers the Business Message

The internet is all about communication. A brand is actually a form of advertising, or communication about products that are available and their attributes. It's important to see a brand in this respect. It is not merely a meaningless logo or a catchy name. It tells a consumer what the product is about in some way as well as why they should purchase it. A clearly defined brand does this well and supplies information just by virtue of its well defined nature. Each time the brand name and/or logo changes hands (or screens) over the web, this information is communicated and reinforced.

Creates a Clear Connection

As noted above, there is a lot for somebody surfing the web to keep in mind as they shop. All kinds of advertising, websites, and unrelated or semi-related content is coming their way during their online shopping experience. Often websites they are looking at are not even the originators or actual vendors of products they are looking at, but some kind of middlemen. If online shops wants visitors to go to them for a product, they need to create a clear and well-defined connection between a product and their specific website. The brand does this. It gives a sales prospect/web surfer something clear to remember and return to as they make their way through all the other online elements competing for their attention.

Gives Credibility

Branding creates credibility and gives customers the feeling that a business is well established. They tend to feel that "major" brands have a clear brand identity. If customers like the products or services that you are selling, the sense that your business is established and credible will give their willingness to buy from you still more support.

Differentiates Brand from Competition

A brand allows for differentiation. When making a choice between sellers of a product, customers go through a choosing process based on a number of factors. In this process they need to have a specific brand to compare with others. Without this they may have a sense that they are only comparing some loosely defined set of set of selling practices or listing sites. A brand gives them much more a clear sense of making a choice.

Allows for Identification with Brand

It is a well-known fact that customers identify with brands that they like and buy. The brand has a clear symbolic presence that the customer considers well suited in some way to their style or personality. A brand gives an online shop a kind of personality of its own with which a customer feels comfortable associating and identifying.

In conclusion, branding is important in all areas of business, and even more so online due to the nature of online sales and marketing. People surfing the web are exposed to a lot of marketing information, and branding helps them make sense on commercial and personal levels of all the data coming their way. It creates a clear connection to an online retailer that gives their products or services the best chance of successfully attracting customers and becoming a site that people revisit.

Sarah writes on behalf of Fluid Branding a promotional products specialist. Fluid Branding have thousands of promotional product from promotional mugs to calculators, from promotional pens to umbrellas. Fluid Branding have something for everyone.

Optimizing Your E-Commerce Site for the Search Engines

Fri, 25 Mar 2011 20:29:34 GMT

The search engines are a fantastic place to get targeted traffic to your ecommerce site. In case you're not familiar, SEO is simply the process of increasing the visibility of a webpage in the search results pages (SERPs). 90% of all internet traffic originates from the search engines, so you can skip the middlemen and head straight to the source with a solid SEO strategy. There are people looking for the items your selling, you just need to position yourself in front of these people. You can do this by choosing the keywords these people are searching for and ranking for them. However, with an ecommerce site, the odds are stacked against you.

Most people get online because they are looking for one (or both) of two things: entertainment or information. The remaining, and much smaller, percentage of internet traffic consists of those looking to buy something. Google is well aware of this and for that reason, they rank informational sites higher. This makes it harder for ecommerce sites to rank in the search engines, but you can still rank for competitive keywords and grab a lot of rankings for product names in the process.

Optimizing Your Site

With an ecommerce site, you don't have a whole lot of content to optimize with keywords. Most of the text comes from reviews that you definitely don't want to tamper with for little SEO benefits. Also, it's more important that your page titles be informative and easy to navigate for users, rather than using specific keywords that might be less intuitive. Basically, we are going to focus on site structure and how you can setup your site to naturally rank better in the search engines.

1. Create Static Home Page and Front-end Site

If you don't have a static homepage, this is definitely something you should consider. You can have dynamic elements, but it is highly recommended that you keep your homepage consistent like the one here at shopping-cart-reviews.com. This accomplishes a few things:

1. Your site is easier to crawl

Having a consistent homepage is going to ensure that your site is easy for the search engines to crawl. You don't want the SE's spiders to find a ton of new or different content every time and have to figure your site's structure all over again.

2. Your Rankings Won't Fluctuate

The best way to confuse the search engines and mess with your rankings is to constantly change the content on a page. If your homepage is always changing, so is your ranking. It's going to be a major pain dealing with the fluctuations and stress of such volatile rankings that result from an ever-changing homepage.

2. Add Informational Content to Your Site

shopping-cart-reviews.com is a great example once again for creating a search friendly site. The article and blog tabs at the top link to a wealth of content that helps the site rank. Google loves content and this is a great way to provide it. One of the most misunderstood or overlooked ways to increase your rank is to simply grow your site. Websites that consistently add fresh, original content are rewarded with consistent improvements in the SERPs.

Another way you can accomplish this is by adding a "Q and A" section or forum to your site. If you're still building traffic, this may not be as helpful since you might be seeing tumbleweeds blow through your forum. However, if you can create the customer/visitor base you need to get enough active participation, your visitors can help create all of this content for you. Not only is this a great hands-free way to improve your rankings, it's also a great way to provide more value to your visitors and get them to stick around on the site for longer.

3. Use Header Tags Effectively

Yet another way you can optimize your ecommerce site is by using your header tags effectively. If you're not familiar, header tags are simply tags that surround text that is well…a header. For example, the title of this article is "Optimizing Your E-Commerce Site for the Search Engines" this is surrounded by title tags. If we were to add header tags to this article they would go around "Optimizing Your Site" and the other numbered headers like this, <h1> Optimizing Your Site</h1>.

Search engines place more importance on text in title and header tags so we want to use them with intent. Since you'll want to rank specific products in the SERPs, it's most important to use your header tags on these product names. It is highly recommended that every product page has an h1 tag surrounding the product name on the page. This is going to have a direct affect on how your product pages rank.

4. Include Breadcrumb Trails

A breadcrumb trail is simply a hierarchy or order of pages you clicked through to get to any page on a site. For example, "Electronics -> Televisons -> HDTVs…". Displaying this at the top of your pages is going to be helpful to your users (which is very important), but it's also going to improve your site's optimization. Breadcrumbs essentially create internal links with anchor text. Each one of these links has the appropriate anchor text and points to another page on your site, and the last link points to the same page it is on. Increasing the number of internal links on your site improves the way that "link juice" and PR flows through your site. Basically, you are going to get further benefits from any link building that you outsource or do yourself.

To reiterate, breadcrumb trails also make your site easier to navigate. As a rule of thumb:

If your site is easier to navigate for people, it's going to be easier for search engines to navigate as well.

Often times the simplest way to optimize for the search engines is just to provide a better user experience. Who would have guessed?

5. Include a Sitemap

One more thing you can do to make your site more crawlable for the SEs is to provide a sitemap. A sitemap is basically a layout of your site that the search engine spiders will use to make sure they crawl every page on your site. The best part is that sitemaps are very easy to generate these days thanks to some free, helpful tools online. You can use http://www.xml-sitemaps.com to quickly create a sitemap for your ecommerce site for free.

Conclusion

Optimizing an ecommerce site presents a number of challenges that informational sites don't have to face. They demand a level of dedication and some clever strategy, but they can become powerhouses in the SERPs. The strongest trait of an ecommerce site is its ability to rank for a ton of different product names, (long-tail keywords) and pull in traffic from hundreds of different terms.

If you follow a consistent link building and optimization strategy like the one just presented in this SEO course, there's no reason you can't establish a strong presence in the SERPs and rank for dozens, or even hundreds of different terms.

Ben Jackson is an SEO expert and enthusiast, and founder of www.seodiscovery.org.

Email Marketing for Success in Ecommerce

Sat, 23 Apr 2011 00:51:26 GMT

The main objective of ecommerce email marketing is to encourage website visitors to carry out your desired action i.e. make a purchase. In order to do this, you need to offer an incentive and email marketing enables you to do this in several ways.

It may be incentive enough that you send well targeted, relevant and timely campaigns. If you send email campaigns to the right demographic, chances are much higher that you will get a strong conversion rate than if you blast campaigns to a larger, less relevant email list.

However, all is not lost if you don't make a sale on the first visit. If you are able to create a relationship with the consumer that will encourage them to return to the site, there is a good chance that you will make the sale at a later date.

Building a relationship with the consumer involves offering other channels of communication that are of interest to them. If you have a newsletter, encourage them to sign up to it by offering a discount to subscribers. Not only will this encourage them to purchase from you, it also provides the perfect data capture opportunity. By marketing to your own email database of warm leads in the future, you Increase the likelihood that they will return to your site and even make multiple purchases. This is also applicable to your RSS feed and social media followers.

The use of consumers' email data should be implemented carefully however. The best email marketers do not simply send material encouraging a sale; they send communication that appears to be a two way dialogue, for example, advice relating to their products.

Another means of implying a dialogue is to gather a small amount of personal information about an individual in addition to their email address. This will serve to build better relations as emails addressed to individuals are proven to have a better rate of conversion. If relevant, an email offering a discount for a person's upcoming birthday could also improve their relationship with you. Being creative with your methods of interaction will keep consumers interested and will therefore encourage sales.

The conclusion to be drawn here is that email marketing is not a one way channel. Consumers expect more from brands than this and if your emails aren't targeted, you are wasting time and money. Many consumers now want and expect a relationship and in order to do this, you need to offer a level of interaction that indicates you care about your customers. Start with addressing email recipients by name and experiment with building your dialogue.

Emily Goodyear is PR & Marketing Executive for Email Marketing Specialists WRM-Media. She also writes the company blog at http://wrmmedia.wordpress.com/ looking at the latest industry trends. Follow her on twitter @Emily_Goodyear or @wrmmedia

Shopping Carts and Search Engine Optimization

Thu, 09 Jun 2005 00:00:00 GMT

Search engine optimization is managing your site in such a way that your site appears near the top of the search results in popular search engines such as Google for the search words important for your business. For example, if you sell discount widgets, you might want to make sure your site appears among the first few search results when people search for “cheap widgets”.

Some shopping carts present challenges in search engine optimization. If optimization is important to you, this is something you will need to take into account when choosing your shopping cart software. Not all shopping carts are suited to search engine optimization.

When looking for an online shopping cart that is suitable for search engine optimization, one effective technique is a system that generates static pages automatically. These are HTML pages that have a unique URL, where the HTML and the URL do not change. Search engines often don’t like pages with long URLs such as www.widgetcorp.com/shop/items.php?id=2322&cat=32&subcat=2&br=1231 so watch out for this.

The shopping cart system should also put the name of your product into the title tag of those HTML pages automatically, and it should also automatically fill in the keywords, description, alt tags, heading, and body text of those HTML pages as well. A good shopping cart that is designed for search engine optimization will also give each product page a file name that relates to that product.

Keep in mind that all of this should occur automatically, as soon as you add a new product to your shopping cart, but you will need to enter the descriptions of your products into the shopping cart administration area with search engine optimization in mind as well, focusing on the key words important to your market.

Make sure that you include the exact name of the product, as well as common words for the product as well. For instance, if your product was Herbal Essences Shampoo, you would enter that name, as well as other words, such as herbs, herbal, shampoo, and hair care products into the description. The shopping cart software can only do so much, the rest is up to you.

All of these elements are vital to search engine optimization. If you have worked hard to optimize all of the other pages of your website for the search engines, why wouldn't you want the pages in your shopping cart optimized as well? With your shopping cart pages optimized, each time someone searches for a product that you offer, that page of your shopping cart stands a good chance of appearing in their search results, which will ultimately increase your sales.

You may also want an ecommerce shopping cart that includes website traffic statistics, and ROI tracking. It should be able to track sales from affiliate programs, banners, text links, and even print media with the use of promotional codes. Of course, it should also be able to track hits from the search engines, which will allow you to tweak and tune your descriptions for better results.

Make sure you read the documentation before choosing a shopping cart system, and be sure that it includes the features that you will need for search engine optimization. If you cannot find this information in the documentation or the website that advertises the shopping cart, contact the developers, or the webmaster for more information. Let them know exactly what features you are looking for.

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.

Email newsletters = $

Tue, 28 Jun 2005 00:00:00 GMT

Small online shops often focus on getting new customers. New customers are obviously important for any business. However, you already have a great source of income out there - customers who have already bought from you. Some studies have shown that it costs 4 times (more in some industries) as much to get a sale from a new customer as from an existing customer. Our profit per customer calculator can help you work out how much more you can make by getting more repeat sales. Probably the best way to get repeat sales from your existing customers is usng an email newsletter. So how do you build an email newsletter?

Many shopping carts have the ability to collect customer email addresses and send out an email

By offering the customer something ... you'll get a lot more people signing up.

newsletter. It's usually simply a matter of turning on a function in your shopping cart to offer them the ability to sign up to your newsletter. You might want to include some copy to entice them to sign up, such as:
"To find out about our latest discounts and new products, sign up for our newsletter".
By offering the customer something - the promise of future discounts, hot industry news, or something else that appeals to your customers you'll get a lot more people signing up.

The next thing you need to do is fulfill the promise you've made! I don't know about you, but when I get a newsletter which is all "buy, buy, buy", and gives me nothing, I usually unsubscribe. Make sure every newsletter gives your customers something. Make it good enough, and your customers might even start forwarding it to their friends, creating new customers for you. You should always make sure to include at least one compelling reason to visit your site - a new product, a special offer, a free download - something to bring them in.

Make sure your newsletter is sent out regularly. Decide a frequency and stick to it. Monthly is often a good bet, but it depends on your industry & customers. If you aren't confident in your writing skills, get someone to help, or check out a site like Kranz Communications which has some good hints for first time writers.

Last but not least, make sure you are familiar with the privacy laws in your country. Privacy is a big deal these days and many countries are creating newer, stricter laws that often carry huge fines for violators. Keep your customers happy, and keep them coming back!

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.

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.

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!

Meet the Maker: Andy Chapman of Ecommerce Templates

Tue, 05 Jul 2005 00:00:00 GMT

In the next of our "Meet the Maker" series, we have Andy Chapman from Ecommerce Templates. I've had the pleasure of interacting with Andy and watching the excellent service he gives his customers in his forums, he's a great guy to deal with. He was kind enough to share his wisdom from dealing with hundreds of online shops over the years.

About You
My name is Andy Chapman and I’m the marketing and sales director of Electronic Shopping Solutions LLC. We offer shopping cart software through www.ecommercetemplates.com and regular Dreamweaver, Frontpage, CSS and Golive templates from our sister store www.thetemplatestore.com

What is the most important thing someone thinking about setting up an online shop should consider?
People should first consider the final cost and work out how much the store will cost over a year / 2 years – taking into account price of the software, hosting fees, payment processing fees, shipping costs, any development / design costs and marketing. Having taken that into consideration a simple plan can be set up to make sure the vendor can survive the first 6 months on relatively low sales. It’s always easy to go for a freebie from your host and then later find out that you need to spend hundreds of dollars on a developer to set it up for you.

What do you think is the most common cause of failure of an online shop? How should people avoid that?
Lots of obvious failings such as not researching the market, not being able to compete on pricing / shipping, not being able to adequately support the products, not estimating the time required each day etc. Spending time before setting up store can prove invaluable. It also seems that a lot of people of will set up their products and categories, get everything looking great and then sit back. Once the products are up, it’s time to start making additional content pages – background on the products, anecdotes about the products, product glossaries, whatever will provide good landing pages from the search engines to get people on your site, get people interested and start funneling them towards checkout. You can see the tumbleweed blowing across many stores due to lack of time and effort.

What trends do you see happening in small to medium business ecommerce stores in the next few years?
I wouldn’t like to make any predictions but I can’t see any reason why small businesses should fear setting up an online store as long as they do their homework and go into the process with their eyes open.

What one thing do you think most shop owners should do more of?
I think a few shop owners lack original content on their sites, relying on product blurb from distributors and manufacturers and only using that on their product descriptions. Stores can never have enough content, and if the navigation is clear then it’s a great way of channeling people to checkout.

Who do you see as the primary audience for your software?
Ecommerce Templates is flexible enough to appeal right across the scale so we don’t have a “primary audience” as such. There are experienced users attracted by the clean and open source code, unlimited products etc whilst other first time users will enjoy the simplicity of getting a store online.

Why should shop owners choose Ecommerce Templates over the competition?
When choosing a shopping cart solution it’s worth looking behind the scenes a bit. At Ecommerce Templates we have always had the philosophy of “support and community first” and can boast having one of the liveliest forums and a network of highly skilled developers from around the world.
Vince, the wizard behind all the code in Ecommerce Templates, has set up the software in a modular fashion meaning we can offer it integrated into our own professionally designed templates or with the possibility of placing the ASP or PHP include lines into an existing site. This has resulted in a powerful solution, and with prices as low as $105 I don’t think we can be beaten on value for money or after sales service.

Meet the Maker: Massimo Arrigoni, the maker of ProductCart

Wed, 29 Jun 2005 00:00:00 GMT

Today we have the first of our "Meet the Maker" series of interviews. We start of by chatting with Massimo Arrigoni, a lovely guy and the man behind some great ecommerce innovations including the excellent ProductCart and ProductCart Build To Order.

Tell us who you are.
Massimo Arrigoni, CEO and Co-Founder, Early Impact LLC.

I have personally been involved with ecommerce since 1995. It was a fascinating new arena back then, so I decided to do some research and ended up writing a long paper on the subject. I remember talking to people about it and they couldn’t care less. Most didn’t even know what the word “electronic commerce” meant at that time.

What is the most important thing someone thinking about setting up an online shop should consider?
There are a lot of different ecommerce solutions out there: do as much research as possible up front. It’s in pain the neck, but it’s worth it. Look at ecommerce stores you like. Try to understand which tools they are using. Find those that are within your budget. Base your decision on how to get started on this research. It’s time consuming, but it’ll pay off.

What do you think is the most common cause of failure of an online shop? How should people avoid that?
Let’s put aside stores that try to sell products that people don’t want, because otherwise the answer is obvious. Let’s say you sell stuff that there is a market for. Your customers expectations when shopping online are set by all of the experience they have accumulated so far. It doesn’t matter that you’re not Amazon or Gap.com. They expect a similar experience. If you store does not look professional and if the checkout process is not well designed, customers will feel uncomfortable and will not buy.

Your customers expectations when shopping online are set by all of the experience they have accumulated so far

What trends do you see happening in small to medium business ecommerce stores in the next few years?
I see fewer and fewer first time users of ecommerce software. Some companies will give up. Those who have been somewhat successful with their first attempt at running an online store will now be ready to upgrade their ecommerce tools. They will be looking for ways to grow sales and new ecommerce features to make that happen. For example, I could ask myself: “how can I quickly send an electronic coupon to everyone that’s purchased product XYZ in the last 2 months to get them to buy again?” Then I’ll go and look for new software that allows me to do that kind of thing. Entry level ecommerce software lacks sophisticated marketing tools. So companies will upgrade.

What one thing do you think most shop owners should do more of?
They don’t do enough marketing. And the marketing they do is typically focused on acquiring new customers, which is very expensive (e.g. pay-per-click campaigns). Instead, they should focus on things like increasing the average order amount, increasing the percentage of repeat customers, increasing the “word of mouth” effect, etc. Unfortunately, in many cases they can’t do much because the software they use doesn’t give them the tools they need. There is a lot of entry level ecommerce software out there, and it typically can’t help you grow your online business.

Who do you see as the primary audience for your software?
ProductCart is being used in almost any industry you can think of. But our focus is on the Web designer and Web developer. We strongly believe in a leveraged sales channel. We are good at developing ecommerce software. These companies are good at providing complete solutions to their clients. So we focus on writing great software, and providing outstanding technical support. Web designers then use our software to build great online store. They like working with us because we keep listening to them and improving ProductCart accordingly, and we never compete with them (i.e. we don’t provide web design or web hosting services).

Why should shop owners choose Product Cart over the competition?
Great features, outstanding support, one-time fee. There are so many features that ProductCart User Guide is over 370 pages long. Store owners have so many options that they often send us enthusiastic messages saying they couldn’t believe what they found after they started using the software. And we support our products with truly outstanding technical support. The “Testimonials” page on our Web site speaks clearly about that. ProductCart can truly help you build a great looking, professional online store. On top of that, it comes with the full ASP source code, so you can work with a Web developer to modify the shopping cart to even better meet your needs, if you ever need to. All for a one-time license fee that starts around $500. It’s a great buy.

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 a 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.

What is a Merchant Account?

Wed, 08 Jun 2005 00:00:00 GMT

There is a difference between a merchant account and a shopping cart. A merchant account is an account used to collect payment, while a shopping cart allows your customers to view products, and add the products that they want to the cart, before proceeding to the checkout - which is where the merchant account comes into play.

Some ecommerce shopping carts include a merchant account, while most require you to have your own merchant account. In most cases, the secure connection (SSL) is not included with the shopping cart, and must be provided by the merchant account gateway or your web host.

Many merchant accounts include a shopping cart. Find out all of the features included with the offered shopping cart, and if it doesn't do what you want it to do, make sure that you will be allowed to use a different shopping cart – these free carts are usually pretty limited. If you do not like the offered shopping cart, and you will not be allowed to use a different one, look for a new merchant account. You should note that most merchant account shopping carts will not allow you to achieve the same look and feel as your website, and have few of the other features of fully integrated shopping carts.

Some shopping carts may not be compatible with your merchant account, and some merchant accounts may not be compatible with your shopping cart. For this reason, you need to check with both sides - the shopping cart developer, and the merchant account company - to ensure that they can work together. www.Shopping-cart-reviews.com lists whether each shopping cart has support for the most popular merchant accounts.

Customers like to have many different options to pay. The more payment options you can offer, the more sales you will make. Make sure your merchant has a good range. For example, some won’t support American Express which might be a problem, especially if you expect a lot of corporate customers.

No matter what online shopping cart system or merchant account you use, the information that is required from the customer must be asked in the right order. Credit card information should never be requested until the customer has been given the actual total amount of their order. For this reason, credit card information is usually requested last. If your merchant account does not ask for the information in the right order, look for a different merchant account, or a different shopping cart system. This will cut down on the number of customers who abandon the shopping cart.

When choosing an online shopping cart, and a merchant account, take your time and choose wisely. Do not allow either side to rush you into a decision. Make sure you are getting exactly what you need to best serve your customers, because without your customers, you won't need either the shopping cart, or the merchant account.

Understanding Payment Gateways

Wed, 08 Jun 2005 00:00:00 GMT

A payment gateway is much like a physical point-of-sale terminal in an offline store, but comes in the form of a 'virtual terminal.' Instead of your customer sliding their card through a machine, they will be entering their credit card or checking account information in a form on a website. The payment gateway is the 'middle man' between your shopping cart, the customers credit card issuer, your merchant account, and all the financial networks in between. Many merchant accounts include the payment gateway, which can be leased or purchased, while others require you to find a separate payment gateway.

Once your customer has used your shopping cart to make their product selections, they are directed to the checkout process. Once they have filled out all the billing and shipping information, the data is encrypted and sent to the payment gateway through a SSL (Secure Socket Layer) connection. The payment gateway validates the information, such as ensuring that there is enough available credit for the purchase and that the card is valid, then sends the information on to your merchant account for processing.

When choosing a payment gateway to use with your shopping cart, you should check to make sure that the payment gateway authenticates the credit card or electronic check, sends and receives transactions over the Internet using an SSL connection, offers administrative and technical support, and ensures complete privacy and security of all sensitive data. You should also ensure that the payment gateway uses an AVS, or Address Verification System, to help prevent fraudulent transactions.

There are fees associated with a payment gateway. Usually, there are set up fees and monthly fees. The payment gateway provider will also usually charge you a percentage of your sales. Make sure that you know exactly what all the fees are, and what they are for, before choosing a payment gateway system. Percentages can vary enormously between a fraction of a percent and 10 or more percent, often depending on the monthly volume you will put through, so it pays to shop around.

If your business has not reached the stage where it is ready to take on the expenses associated with payment gateways and merchant accounts, you also have the option of choosing a third party merchant account, such as Paypal, 2CheckOut, Ibill, or Authorize.net. These third party merchant accounts do not require you to have a merchant account or a payment gateway provider.

It is also important to make sure that the payment gateway that you want to use is compatible with both your shopping cart and your merchant account. Check your shopping cart documentation and your merchant account provider to be sure. For simplicity, try to choose a merchant account that includes the payment gateway.

PCI compliance for ecommerce businesses

Thu, 17 Jun 2010 06:23:57 GMT

As an ecommerce merchant who accepts credit cards, you’ve probably heard of PCI or PCI DSS. PCI DSS stands for Payment Cards Industry Data Security Standard, a recent regulatory change that significantly affects the way credit card payments are processed. All merchants that accept credit cards need to be PCI compliant, regardless of the size of their business or the industry in which they operate.

How does PCI DSS affect your business?

Costly Upgrades: The state of your current system will ultimately determine how PCI DSS affects your business. If you meet the current requirements, then you may not face any significant changes at all. The most common situation involves payment solution and network upgrades that could cost you a lot of money.
Safe Harbor Status: One of the main benefits of becoming PCI DSS compliant is safe harbor status. This designation protects you from fines in the event of a security breach. In order to benefit from safe harbor status, all security requirements must be in place.
Fines:If your business is not PCI DSS compliant, it may be audited, fined or sued. In the worst-case scenario, you may lose the right to process credit cards entirely.

Ecommerce businesses can improve payment security by following the 12 requirements outlined by the PCI DSS. These requirements aim to reduce the risk merchants face when handling sensitive credit card account data. Many ecommerce businesses are unaware that during the payment process, account information is being stored in their payment system. By retaining this data, merchants immediately become liable for any damages that may result in the event of a data breach. As a result, you need to be very careful in selecting an ecommerce merchant account.

The introduction of the PCI DSS in 2010 has forced businesses to seriously evaluate the integrity of their payment systems. Along with increasing their exposure to fraud costs, businesses that wait to become PCI compliant risk losing their processing privileges entirely in the event of a serious data breach.

How can ecommerce merchants become PCI compliant?

First, you may have to change your current systems in order to meet PCI DSS standards. If you currently operate with an up-to-date solution, you may only need a slight upgrade. If your system is old, it may be worthwhile to switch to a new solution that offers a more secure payment environment. We recommend contacting a merchant account provider to help determine which option is best for your business.

Second, merchants must document their security compliance. Depending on the amount of transactions a business processes, they may require a more thorough documentation process.

Lower lever merchants have up to six million transactions per year. These businesses should complete a self-assessment questionnaire and quarterly security scanning to ensure PCI DSS requirements are met.
Level one merchants have more than six million transactions per year. In addition to the lower lever requirements, level one merchants must facilitate an annual audit by a qualified security assessor.

The subject of PCI DSS compliance can be overwhelming. Make sure you contact your merchant account provider for more information and help getting set up with a secure payment solution.

PCI DSS Resources

VersaPay Canadian merchant accounts
PCI Security Standards Council

5 Tips On Starting An Online Shop

Fri, 25 Mar 2011 22:12:08 GMT

This article is by Eric Siu, a specialist at Wpromote, ppc management and search engine optimization company.

Here's five tips you should keep on your TO-DO list for the startup of your online shop.

1. Build Your Knowledge of Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

If you want your online shop to become a thriving business, one of the measures of success is getting high rankings for your web site in Yahoo and Google. Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is the way you do just that. If you don't know SEO, remember that your competitors do. SEO Experts are available for hire to fine-tune the aspects of your web site that will increase your rankings, but you likely cannot afford them yet. Educate yourself online about SEO -- take a look at the SearchEngineWatch.com website for what you can do on your own.

2. Buy an Accounting Package

If you are making sales or bringing in money in any way, you must account for that money, if only to find out if you're making a profit. And there's always the tax man to worry about. Here's three affordable software packages that you can buy in this area:

- QuickBooks from Intuit
- Peachtree from Sage
- Small Business Accounting (SBA), part of Microsoft's Office line of products

3. Find and Use a Web Analytics Package

Web analytics gives you data on visits to your site: how many unique visitors, what pages of your website are visited, what keyword searches are used to find your web site, etc. You'll be able to determine your Conversion Rate, or the percentage of visitors to your web site who buy something. You want your Conversion Rate to increase over time, and Web analytics are the best way to see the direction, up or down, that this number is going. Plus, you'll want to see how the web sites of your competitors are doing. Get to know link-building, but start slow with such services as Google's AdWords. Google does offer some free analytics, but you have to ask to be invited to join the program and then wait to be invited. Some web analytics applications you might consider buying are:

- WebTrends (Small Business Edition) from NetIQ
- ClickTracks Pro from ClickTracks
- Hitbox and HBX from WebSideStory
- Alexa, a website at alexa.com

4. Set Up a Security System and Data Backup

There are lots of people out on the Internet ready to steal your money and your data. You'll need both security software to protect your website and backup software to save and recover data. Norton, McAfee and Symantec all sell security software packages. Symantec, F-Secure and Carbonite all offer online and in-house backup systems.

5. Create a Marketing Plan

A marketing plan will keep you on track for what you're doing to attract customers to your website, and how you'll treat those customers once they've bought something from you. Remember that your marketing plan should be dynamic -- a plan set in concrete does you no good at all. Several action items to put in your marketing plan are:

- List your web site on Froogle, Google's free comparison-shopping search engine.
- Link your web site to a Web Ring of similar sites.
- Offer free services to visitors, and more to customers.
- Publish a blog about your industry. - Use PR Web to publish online press releases.
- Publish a periodic e-mail newsletter.

Five steps to starting your online business

Thu, 24 Mar 2011 04:36:43 GMT

Many aspiring entrepreneurs look to the internet as their gateway toward starting up a successful business. But launching a profitable online business is not something that will occur overnight. Laying a solid foundation for your business comes through creativity, a strong work ethic and attention to detail.

Here are five basic steps you need to know if you want to form a successful online business:

1. Find your niche.
If you want to succeed, the best approach is to base your business around something you are passionate about. Your service or product should be more than simply a means to an end. If you care about the product or service you want to offer, you will naturally create better website content and invest more time in building your business.

2. Study the market.
How is the product or service you want to offer marketed? Who are your competitors? What is their level of success or failure? You need to answer these questions to see if your potential business will be viable. Once you have determined there is a market for your product, you need to find ways to make your business stand out from the crowd. Offer discounts or free trial periods to attract new customers. Do promotional events to draw in new visitors. It is a good idea to observe how competitors approach things and find ways you can improve upon what they are already doing.

3. Know your customer.
Your business will not go too far if you don't understand who your customers are and what they want. Building your website correctly requires identifying your customer. You will likely be targeting a different audience if you are selling books than if you are offering bicycles and bicycle gear. Tailor your business to meet their needs. Knowing who your customer is can help you build and design a better website because you will better understand what appeals to them.

4. Optimize your website.
The goal of every online business is to bring in web traffic. One of the best ways to do that is through effective usage of SEO keywords. Keywords are the words or phrases people type into search engines. The right SEO keywords can help your website rank higher in search engine results, which will cause more potential customers to notice your website and click on it to check things out. You should actively research which keywords are most connected with whatever product or service you offer, so you know what SEO content will work to attract attention to your business more quickly.

5. Market relentlessly.
A recipe for any successful business starts with exposure. Get your brand out there. Be active in social media like Facebook or Twitter, promoting your brand on a consistent basis. Start your own blog. Any content you put on your site -- whether it is text, photos or videos -- should exist for the sole purpose of driving increased traffic to your site. Do everything in your power to forge an unbreakable connection between your business and whatever product or service you offer in the minds of your customers.

Nicole Rodgers has been in the tech industry for 3 years; she currently advises companies on their marketing budgets and recommends split testing every marketing campaign to yield better results.

Shopping Cart Review latest articles

Top 10 Must-Have Ecommerce Features

AUTHOR BIO

3 vital things people often forget when building an online shop

Design to sell

Let's talk money

Go tell it on the...

Should I buy or use a hosted shopping cart?

Hosted shopping carts

Downloaded shopping carts

What should I choose?

What database do I need for my shopping cart software?

Get a shopping cart for free with almost no work (but what's the catch?)

Which language should I choose?

Choosing shopping cart software

Introduction

Key groups of factors

Who you are

Types of shopping carts

Additional services

Integration with external systems

Technical support, forum & third-party solutions

Tips and advice for research

Requirements

Looking in search engines using relevant queries

Looking for reviews and comments on forums and directories

Contacting sales department with your questions

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

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

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

3 Steps to choosing the right cart

1. Understand Your Business

2. Understand Your Customers

3. Requirements Gathering

What's the best Dreamweaver Shopping Cart for me?

Find the best Frontpage Shopping Cart Software for your Online Shop

A Brief History of the Shopping Cart

5 Worst ways to pick a Shopping Cart

1. Don’t plan your site

2. Don’t involve your techies

3. Get your techies too involved

4. Don’t worry about the search engines till later

5. Avoid all Shopping Carts that don’t have unlimited free support

Free Shopping Carts – Bargain or Baloney?

Do I need source code for my shopping cart?

Should you buy or rent your shopping cart?

How to Write Good Product Descriptions for an Ecommerce Site

How to Design Your Website with Clients in Mind

The Funnel Effect – Making Customers Buy

Selecting A Domain Name For Your Ecommerce Website

It All Starts with a Domain Name

Domain names can essentially be broken into two categories:

Researching a Good Keyword-Rich Domain Name

Pairing Down Your Phrases

Finding out if Your Domain Name is Available

Consider Buying a Used Domain Name

How to Buy a Used Domain Name

Buying an Existing Site

Summing it All Up

AUTHOR BIO

eCommerce Website Development Tips

Use Your Own Affiliate Program

Reducing and Capitalizing on Shopping Cart Abandonment

Ten Ways to Grow Your Online Store Sales