www.delpir.com

If you’re planning on opening your own online store, you should make sure that you learn all about e-commerce, so that you can select the best online store builder for your business. One big decision you want to make early on is whether you want your online store to consist only of a shopping cart, or if you want your online store to be your entire site, with shopping cart functionalities available to every page. Let’s look at the options.

Ecommerce Option One: Complete Online Store

Software that creates a complete online store for you, with completely integrated ecommerce capabilities, is arguably best for new websites, since it will save you the trouble of buying separate content management software and then integrating it with your current site.

Here are some things you can do with a completely ecommerce-enabled web store that you can’t do with a traditional website that just has a CMS attached:

• Show a “in your shopping cart” list of selected items to users who add something to a cart, then continue browsing your site. Studies have shown that “shopping cart abandonment,” in which users add something to the cart and then forget about it while browsing the site, is greatly reduced when users can see their shopping cart contents in front of them at all times.
• Feature a different product on your homepage each day, rotating based on a dynamic selection from your shopping cart inventory.
• Automatically recommend a brand new product to users who are browsing a related page on your site-without updating the code on that page.
• Remind returning visitors to your homepage of an item they added to a shopping cart on a previous visit but did not purchase.
• Manage your entire website’s look and feel, including both the regular pages and the shopping cart pages, from a single interfaces, without having to copy changes in design from one to the other.
• Automatically remove a product featured on regular pages of your site when it is no longer in stock.
• Show an updated list of the latest additions to your inventory on the homepage or other non-shopping-cart pages.
• Display a signup form for users to receive email announcements of new products, dynamically generated from your web store.

Ecommerce Option Two: Separate Shopping Cart

If you already have a website, transferring everything to a new web store system can be daunting. You may want to start your foray into ecommerce with a simple add-on shopping cart.

But don’t limit your possibilities for the future. You can still employ a full-featured web store now and simply use only its shopping cart functions. Simply set up the online store to show in a directory or subdomain of your existing domain, or host it off-site completely. Then link to the individual product pages on the web store from your existing site.

Users never have to know the shopping cart is actually a full-featured site with its own homepage-they’ll never see those pages, and in many web store software packages, you can simply disable those pages from every being created.

After all, on the web you don’t have to buy a bigger building to expand your store. Why limit your growth with less-fully-featured software? Choose ecommerce software that will grow with your business, and your store can grow as big as you can make it.

Joel Walsh is a writer and online business owner. Check out this affordable web store: Ecommerce Solutions: http://www.easystorecreator.com

Share This

An online store is a 24 hour active revenue machine, it should accurately
display and describe your products and services in a professional manner to give
you the best opportunity for each and every sale. Your success depends on this.

Now, don’t get the wrong idea, a site design does not need to be full flash,
loads of custom images and special entry pages, look at Google, they have a nice
logo and a clean understandable landing page. Depending on your target market,
you may only need text to make your sales, but the text still needs to be
clearly layed out and understandable.
It’s always best to carefully study and consider the designer for your
website. Make sure he/she is prepared to show you many examples and ask many
questions about your needs. They should ask for example sites that you like and
work to your budget, not up-sell you special Flash graphics.
If you are working with an ecommerce website shopping
cart then it’s advisable that you keep all design services and
software technology within the one company as it’s important for the designer to
know the capabilities of the shopping cart software they need to work on.

Design layout.

Layout of a website is extremely important to the ease of navigation for your
customers. Their product of choice should only be within 3 clicks from the home
page. Be sure to to have an easy to use category menu and obvious product titles
with good descriptions directly below. Always aim to cross sell in your product
pages with thumbnails of related items.

If you are using custom graphics or flash design, make sure this is kelp to a
minimum in a shopping cart and only serves as a
quick impressive display of professionalism rather than showing off how much money you have.
Your design needs to look professional for one important reason. If your site
looks like it was built yesterday and could easily be taken down today because
you obviously don’t care about the look of your business, then why would your
customers be comfortable in spending money with you. Trust level is a big reason
for customers parting with their hard earned money.

Remember, you only have one chance to make a first impression. If a visitor
comes to your site and doesn’t like what they see, their gone and there’s a good
chance they’ll never come back.

James O’Brien
Professional hosted and managedshopping
cart software

Share This

Why should you pay for a remotely hosted shopping cart for your small business website, rather than just install a free OpenSource shopping cart on your site?

There are a lot of reasons:

1. Focus. Your business is selling stuff, not installing and managing a complicated script. You’ll have enough issues running a business that you won’t be able to outsource to someone else the way you can with a shopping cart script.
2. Price. Paid hosted shopping cart software’s price is inconsequential: $10-$100/month. If that’s a significant expense for your business, you need to look into improving your profit margin.
3. Support. While support for “paid” business software is included in the cheap price, support for “free” business software is pretty expensive. OpenSource and other free software come without any support except forums for do-it-yourself-ers to share ideas. So, you’ll end up paying someone to install and maintain it. Or you do it yourself, which costs so much time it’s more expensive than paying someone if your time is worth anything.
4. Installation. When you buy hosted software on a subscription plan, installation is already done and support is included. When you have an issue-and have you ever had software that you didn’t have an issue with at least once?-you don’t have to pay a developer $150/hour to make it go away.
5. Security. Security issues are taken care of for you by the provider-no patching software.
6. Speed. Hosted online shopping carts really do work now, out of the box. You just input your inventory and go. OpenSource shopping carts come with dozens of customization options that will take you hours just to decide you don’t need most of them.
7. Peace of mind. The shopping cart is the jugular vein of an online business. If anything makes the blood stop flowing, however minor the cause, you’ll feel it fast. If you are the one who has to make sure the blood stays flowing, or if you have to rely on the availability of a freelance programmer, you won’t be getting the soundest sleep. Let a specialist do that worrying for you, 24 hours a day.

Joel Walsh is a business writer. Try EasyStoreCreator for an easy hosted shopping cart software: http://www.easystorecreator.com

Share This