e-Commerce and Online Shopping Carts
Selling goods and services online is a must for most companies these days. Selecting an online shopping cart or e-commerce system can be a bit like trying to find a needle in a haystack though. Let’s start with three things you should consider first and the pros and cons of each.
- Self hosted online carts/e-commerce systems – These are online carts that allow you to purchase the actual software and licensing to implement on your own website and hosting server. These tend to be the most inexpensive options ranging from free, open source carts like OsCommerce, Zen Cart and the Magento Community e-Commerce system to commercial carts anywhere from the hundreds to thousands of dollars.
Obviously the free, open source carts would be an appealing first choice but the disadvantages are little to no technical support and buggy functionality. They can be quite costly if you need to hire someone for custom programing or fixes. The next step up are the paid carts which often come with better documentation and technical support. The paid carts also tend to have more features (more or less depending on the cart) than a free online cart. Though most carts have the same primary features many special features such as multiple shipping addresses, custom HTML coding and SEO friendliness can be included on some carts but not all. Your best solution is to make a list of desired features you need in an e-commerce system and research which cart has what you need. If you’re lucky, you’ll get all the features you need but you may have to live without some of them in exchange for a lower price. - Hosted online carts/e-commerce systems – These are systems like Yahoo Store and others where you pay a monthly fee to upload your photos, text, etc. and maintain your entire online cart in real time on the web. The advantages are that these carts tend to have more features and are in constant development so you always have the latest, greatest upgrades and new features. Technical support is usually a phone call away and for some non-technical website owners, these kind of carts can be very user friendly.
The downside to these type of carts is the monthly cost which can increase at any times. Some of these systems such as Yahoo or PayPal also charge transaction fees as well which can eat away at your profits. If you have a web developer working with you, his or her hands would be tied in regards to any type of custom programming or alterations because these types of e-commerce systems are proprietary and the code is off limits. And finally, if you decide to quit one of these e-commerce systems everything is gone. There is no way to save the cart’s contents to simply upload and re-start at a later time. - Custom designed shopping carts/e-commerce systems – If you’re an enterprise size company with the budget to afford it, a custom designed e-commerce system is the best choice of all. Most of the big online marketers are not using open source or hosted carts. They are building and designing these systems in-house or in affiliation with a development firm to provide the online shopping experience right down to every last detail. Prices can start at $50,000 and range into the hundreds of thousands. The obvious disadvantage is cost to most small and mid-size businesses.
So how do you find the shopping cart or e-commerce system that best fits your company’s needs? It should begin with a plan and objectives for what your e-commerce needs really are. Compile a list of features and then check out the following websites to compare e-commerce systems and carts. Check out the demos for both the front end (what the customers sees and uses) and the administrative back end (what you need to manage your cart, process orders, etc.). Once you’ve narrowed it down, compare prices and perhaps look for ratings, reviews and/or complaints about the e-commerce system you’re considering.
These websites will hep you get started:
http://www.shoppingcartindex.com/
Dude, Where’s My Website?
It seems that everyone has a website in this day and age. The recession also helped to cause a mass migration to the web as an inexpensive method of advertising or communicating with others. The results? More competition in the search engines for that coveted web ranking spot on page one of the search results. Let’s face it, if you’re not in the first page of results, chances are that most visitors won’t continue on to subsequent results pages to find you. The web is a fast and fickle environment and most people don’t stick around long.
Ok, so you’ve got this beautiful new website created by your brother’s nephew. He’s learning graphic design in high school, so he chopped up and image, converted it to a web page and posted it to the web. Oh and he also dabbles with Flash, that famous (or infamous) animation tool that produces some dazzling effects. You’re oh so proud of your new, flashy website and certain that the world will beat a path to your website. A month later, the website’s still flashy but nobody knows it’s there. Hmm, why can that be?
As any experienced web developer/designer knows, the number one rule in web design has been, and remains simple, “content is king”. Content is meaningful, relevant text with a good ratio of targeted keywords and perhaps a photo or two added to the page for aesthetic value. A proper, relevant description within the page title. keywords and description meta-tags are also a must. These are the search engine optimization (SEO) basics from back in the early days of the web and they form the foundation for today’s sophisticated websites. Most amateurs or hobbyists are unaware of these basic rules, which is why their websites fail to attract search engine spiders, ultimately resulting in a lack of visitors.
Search engines do not care about Flash, photos or videos. Search engines love HTML text though and anxiously devour relevancy and good content. They also take note of your title and description meta-tags but the description tag is obsolete now, due to years of misuse. Proper SEO also includes relevant, reciprocal links with other high quality websites, unique content (often referred to a niche subjects) and integration with social media and blogs. A successful website is very much akin to a garden. The more care and feeding you put into search engine optimization, the more visitors you will attract to your website.
How Roboform Can Make Your Life Easier
I don’t often plug any specific products but I came across one recently that I just cannot live without. I’ll bet that once you’ve tried it, browsing the web just won’t be the same without RoboForm either. Yeah, RoboForm (no relation to RoboCop?).
It’s a great little program that manages all of your website logins, passwords, ID’s etc. It literally only takes seconds to login to websites and saves you a lot of typing. But what I really love about RoboForm is the way it fills in forms. Nobody likes the tedious task of filling in line after line of forms. With this great little piece of software, you only fill in a form once and it saves everything. The next time you come across a form, just click a button and in one second it pre-fills form data into a web page and saves you a lot of valuable time.
RoboForm can be installed on multiple computers and synced over the web, so that the latest changes or logins are automatically available on other computers. Give it a try now, while it’s only $9.95.
Email Marketing Tips
To Blog or not to Blog?
It wasn’t long ago when “blogs” (or web logs) were all the rage and the hot item on the web. These days, blogs have taken somewhat of a backseat to Facebook and Twitter. The strange thing is that everyone thought they needed a blog, even though they didn’t understand what a blog is or in some cases, never even seen one!
Like everything else on the web, blogs started out as the new kid on the block and quickly became the darlings of the search engine world. Back in the early days, it seemed that Google and others couldn’t get enough of blog feeds. Now of course, the value has been watered down significantly because “everybody has a blog”. But do most people or businesses really need a blog?
No they do not.
First, you must have a passion to write. If you’re going to write something it should be interesting, unique and engaging. Think of a blog as a newspaper editorial column where you want people to come back continually to add their opinions. If you can do that, then you have created a successful blog. The next most important thing (and where most blogs fail) are keeping content relevant and up to date. If you don’t have time to add new posts or update content, chances are that your readers probably won’t come back anytime soon. The main attraction to blogs are their interactive and social nature. Like discussion forums of old, blogs are the true forefathers of today’s social media offerings.
So the bottom line is that if you’re interested in building an online community of sorts, a blog is still a great thing to have. If you’re just doing it to keep up with the competition or to influence search engines, then your efforts are probably best invested in something else.