Administrative Interface

The administrative interface of X-cart is categorized into six main sections; Administration, Affiliates, Management, Your Profile, Authentication, and Help. All of these sections can be accessed with ease from the main interface, in the web browser of your choice. Although the navigation and functionality of the software is relatively simple once it is setup, it may be difficult for the novice user to configure the software to match their server’s needs. It should be mentioned however that users do have the option of having the software configured for a fee of $50.

If you’re new to eCommerce web hosting, then it may be optimal to spend the $50 to avoid any hassle involved with installing and setting up the software. Most users find the installation and setup fee is worth the amount of features offered by X-Cart. Once the software has been configured, you can install it on any hosting account you’d like, and there are no limitations to it’s uses. If you’re having trouble finding a web host, you could also refer to the list of recommended web hosts on X-Carts site.

Category Manager

One of the more notable features of X-Cart is the Category Manager, which is a user-friendly administrative toll that lets you effectively organize your product catalog. With the Category Manager you can add as many categories as you’d like. You can also add subcategories by simply adding a slash to the category directory. For example, you could add a Horror sub-category in the “Movies” category by typing – Movies/Horror. This aids in site organization by providing a feature that is usually seen in content management systems, but rarely employed in shopping cart solutions.

Traffic and Sales Analysis

X-cart also offers a unique traffic analysis tool, providing detailed reports of the shopping carts use. For example, the conversion funnel report shows you the specific point in time when potential customers abandoned the shopping process. The software tracks the habits of customers as soon as they enter the site, noting which products they add to the cart, how long they shop, which products they view, and other crucial statistics. This information can be very useful in optimizing your site for maximum sales.

Expandability

One of the best aspects of X-Cart is it’s expandability. The user can expand the abilities of the software by adding modules that improve the overall functionality of the shopping cart. The amount of modules you’ll receive will depend upon the version of X-Cart you purchase. Although the software is fully customizable, novice users may find it somewhat difficult to edit the templates and design of the software without prior training. Fortunately, the software includes reliable and extensive support.

Beginning an online Business

With a brick and mortar business, the main challenges presented involve initial investments, whereas the establishment of an online business requires less investment and more decision making. In the online world, decisions are the biggest investments you’ll make. As soon as you begin your first online endeavor the decisions and question asking begins – What do I want the website to look like? How am I going to list the products? In which way am I going to market the products? All of these obvious question com to mind fairly quickly, however the novice will often overlook one fundamental question – Which eCommerce web hosting solution am I going to use? Comparing the following attributes will help you make that crucial decision.

Security

The single most important attribute an eCommerce solution can have is security. When dealing with credit card numbers, bank account numbers, and other sensitive information online on a daily business, it is absolutely imperative to secure this info. The internet is a very dangerous place, crawling with hackers and cyber criminals looking to steal anything they can get their hand son. To prevent yourself from becoming the victim, you’ll want to make sure your eCommerce plan offers top-of-the-line encryption services such as SSL, as well as fully functional firewalls and anti-virus programs that scan your web applications.

Reliability

The next factor to consider would be reliability. Running an online business is all about providing customer convenience. In fact, the main reason why consumers choose to shop online rather than go to the store is convenience. Offering your customers maximum convenience means providing a stable and convenient website. If your eCommerce hosting plan is unreliable, then your site will be plagued with crashes and poor performance on a regular basis. Make sure you look for packages with unlimited features, such as unlimited bandwidth and server space. Customer reviews will also help you decide which plan would be the most reliable.

Support

Another attribute that is closely related to reliability is support. Users that are just beginning an online business will need a competent support staff ready to handle their problems at all times. As an online business owner, you’ll inevitably face many problems as you learn the ins and out of eCommerce. To simplify this learning experience you’ll need a good support staff by your side. Make sure the service you choose offers 24 hour support, and can be contacted in a variety of ways. Perhaps the best way to gauge the support capabilities of a company is by reading reviews and calling the support staff yourself.

Easy Access to On Demand Products

When a customer comes to your website looking for a specific product, the last thing they want to do is perform a lengthy search to find it. If it takes them longer than five minutes, then you can rest assured they will buy the product from someone else. The best way to solve this problem is to offer a search functionality in your online store. Many commerce web hosting solutions include a search function by default. Before deciding on a specific search function, you may want to investigate the features of the search tool. It would be best to us ea search function that lets customers conduct searches based on a specific set of criteria. If you’re having trouble finding out how to integrate the search function with your website, then you may want to contact customer service.  Make sure the search bar is in plain site, because the last thing you want is a search bar that needs to be searched for!

Be Flexible

If you want to sell products to the largest audience possible, then you’ll want to be flexible with your payment and shipping options. Every payment method that you don’t accept is costing you money in the long term. It is extremely important to offer alternate payment methods such as PayPal or AlertPay, as many of your customers will feel a lot more secure paying you through these programs. You may also want to add a feature that gives your customers the ability to put items on layaway. In the ecommerce market this feature is known as a wishlist. Sometimes customers may not want to purchase something at the moment, but instead would like to be reminded of the item at a later date, like a friend or family member’s birthday. Find out how to install the wishlist feature offered by your web hosting company to give your customers this convenience.

Streamline the Checkout

Many shoppers are discouraged by sites that require them to perform many tasks just to buy a product. After all, they are the one’s paying for the product or service, so they shouldn’t have to do anything more than pay right? Unfortunately, man business owners sabotage a large portion of their sales by asking too much of their customers. For example, some ecommerce sites want you to fill out surveys or confirm information before you can buy something. While this will give you added information about your target audience, it can also cause you to lose a great portion of your targeted audience. Instead of requiring your guests to register before buying, why not use the information given at checkout as their registration info. Many sites combine the checkout with the registration process to make the shopping experience quicker and more convenient for the customer.

How Much Space Do You Need

Purchasing a new storage device requires the assessment of your storage needs. If you only need to backup a few things, then a simple USB drive will suffice. Even though USB drives do not consume a lot of space, they are capable of holding vast amounts of data and are seen as a good way to backup your data.  If you need to store more then you may want to consider an external hard drive.

Outsourcing Storage Space

If you do not want to store your data on a physical device at your home or office, then you can always opt for virtual storage with a third-party provider.  With a good data hosting service, you will receive the benefit of an online interface that will allow you to easily transfer your files,  and you’ll also receive plenty of bandwidth. Before selecting a third-party data hosting service, make sure they are reputable and take plenty of security measures to help protect your website’s data. The data must be secure during the entire time it is stored on their server to prevent data loss.

Speed Necessity

If you need to transfer a lot of data at one point in time, then speed should most definitely be a determining factor. It is important to consider all of the aspects of the storage provider, including speed, memory and disk space. Normally the best speeds are provided by interfaces such as  IDE, Firewire, SCSI, parallel, and USB. These storage devices are of the plug and play variety and are very easy to use and maintain.

Making the Right Decision

There are plenty of options available concerning storage for your e-commerce website. It is not hard to find  a service that will accommodate your needs, however it is best to make sure you make the right decision initially.

Make Shopping Simple

Asking too much of your customers can and will discourage them from shopping with you. Sometimes something as simple as asking for too much information at checkout can drive your customers right into the your competitor’s hands. This problem not only occurs at checkout, but also in the user registration process. In fact, it may be helpful to let shoppers buy products without registering at all! The problem is, most people don’t like providing the same information twice, and most of the time the information required at checkout is the same information required during registration. Obviously this kind of situation can become a nuisance to your customers rather quickly.

Make Your Products Visible

Making your products easy to browse through and find is a great way to increase your sales. One of the ways you can increase product visibility and site functionality is by adding a search function to your site.  If you do decide to add a search function, make sure it is a comprehensive one that gives the customer the ability to search based on several criteria such as price. The goal is to make any product in your online store accessible within a few short clicks.

Be Flexible

Make sure you are not limiting yourself to a few exclusive payment options. Offering payment platforms such as PayPal or AlertPay will noticeably increase your sales quickly. Another way to give your customers more options is to add a wish list option to the shopping cart. Providing a wish list function gives your customers the opportunity to return to your site at a later date and make the purchase then.

Describe Your Products Thoroughly

Many customers rightfully shy away from websites that do not do a thorough job of describing their products. An in-depth product description conveys an image of professionalism. Make sure your description of the product is very detailed and include at least one picture on the product page. You should also make sure you denote the quantity you have in stock on the product page, this way customers do not attempt to buy an out-of-stock product unknowingly.

Make the Experience Fast and Easy

Although you have an ever-expanding amount of fancy options that you can add to your website, sometimes it is best to keep the interface simple yet effective. Many times customers can become overwhelmed by flashy designs and unnecessary functions.  Remember that most of your customers are shopping online for convenience.

1. Assess Your Needs

Finding the right ecommerce plan will depend largely upon your needs as an online business owner. What is right for another company may not necessarily be right for you. If you’re planning on running a smaller operation then you could get by with the bare minimum, however it is important to consider scalability. Choosing the cheapest service will almost always end in disaster, especially if you plan on expanding your business in the near future. A general rule would be to consider reliability over affordability. If you have a lot of products to sell then you’ll want to purchase a plan that comes with unlimited disk space and high bandwidth. Many times the best option for large business owners is a dedicated server.

A website lacking these server features can suffer downtime, and ultimately loss of business. The appearance of your website is important no matter how big or small your business is. The goal of a small business owner is to be able to compete with the big corporations that often consume all of the business within a particular niche. Doing this would be nearly impossible without the programming tools included in a good ecommerce hosting solution.

2. Review Payment Methods

Once you know what you need in terms of server space and features, it’s time to consider how you’ll be paid for your efforts as an online business owner. Once your customers have decided to purchase a product or service from you, you’ll want to make it easy for them to checkout and pay you. Therefore a shopping cart solution is crucial to your website. In fact, most customers will leave your website if you do not have a secure shopping cart feature. It is best to have a merchant account, however you can also accept credit card payments with a simple PayPal account.

3. Make Your Decision

Now that you’ve rounded up a few prospects base on the above attribute, it’s time to make your decision. While price should not be a deciding factor, it should be noted that most web hosting plans are very affordable due to the competitive nature of the market. Therefore, it should be easy to find a plan that fits your needs in terms of finances and server requirements.

osCommerce

As open-source software, the osCommerce shopping cart is free to use.  The program is integrated with a number of features that can easily be enabled and configured.  The osCommerce shopping cart gives you the ability to add multiple items to your store, organize them in categories, give out discounts, run special promotions and much more.  It also offers built-in shipping and tax capabilities to ensure accuracy.  With this shopping cart, you can set prices in different currencies and accept payment through methods such as credit cards, Payal and e-checks.  osCommerce is extremely popular and currently powers a large number of stores on the web.

CREloaded

The CREloaded shopping cart is a fork built on the source code of osCommerce.  This feature-rich platform caters to beginners and professionals alike, offering the ability to process credit card payments via PayPal or Authorize.net.  You can list a large number of products, set discounts and shipping costs.  CREloaded’s greatest attribute is the wide variety of themes that allow you to customize the look of your storefront.  This software is tailored to help you create a store that fully brands your identity and enhances the customer’s shopping experience.

Zen Cart

Zen Cart is another open-source shopping cart freely distributed under the GNU General Public License.  This software was designed with simplicity in mind but offers some very powerful features.  Zen Cart lets you set up an unlimited amount of products and organize them in numerous categories.  The program supports multiple payment options and different currencies as well as top-notch security mechanisms such as SSL certificates.  The built-in control panel allows you to mange products and all related items from a centralized area.

Magento

Magento is one of the latest open-source shopping cart applications.  This e-commerce platform offers a lot exclusive features geared towards managing customer relations and marketing your store.  The user-friendly interface allows you to control virtually every aspect of the store from listing and organizing products to setting up browser options and special promotions.   This shopping cart software sets itself a part from the competition with built-in analytics, reporting and promotion tools.  Magento is completely scalable and backed by an extensive support team.  Though cost effective in comparison to premium shopping carts, Magento isn’t free like the other software mentioned in this article.

Conclusion

These are just a few of several highly functional open-source shopping carts.  Like most open-source technologies, these programs can be easily incorporated into your existing e-commerce site.

What is Fantastico?

Fantastico is an extremely useful application that usually comes free in web hosting accounts powered by the cPanel control panel.  Designed to run on Unix-like platforms, its purpose is to facilitate the simple installation of a wide range of popular scripts.  These add-on programs are totally free and can literally be installed in a matter of minutes.  The Fantastico advantage is all in the software and below are some of the categories you will find.

Blogs

The blog represents one of the very first social networking platforms and Fantastico gives you a wonderful variety to choose from.  Both Nucleus and b2Evolution are included but the most notable of all has to be WordPress.  Easily the most popular blogging application available, WordPress is widely supported by a large community and can be enhanced through a number of themes and templates.  If you’re looking to delve into the Blogosphere, Fantastico has you covered.

Content Management

Content management systems provide webmasters with a more effective way to build and administer their websites.  Even though most web hosting accounts come integrated site builders, these utilities fail in comparison to the power of a CMS.   This type of software is ideal for running medium to large sized websites and has the ability to assign varying levels of administrative access and permissions.  Some of today’s most popular community-based sites are running on content management systems.  The CMS lineup you will find in Fantastico includes Drupal, Mambo, Tiki Wiki, XOOPS and Joomla among several others.

Customer Relations

Establishing trusting relationships with customers is vital to the success of any business.  Fantastico betters the chance of keeping your customer base happy with applications like Help Center Live, osTicket, PHP Support Tickets, Support Services Manager and more.  These programs give you the ability to create the ultimate support center where your customers can get assistance through support tickets, FAQs, video tutorials and downloadable documentation.  Even if you can’t be around to answer the phone 24/7, such resources can assure that your customers are still able to get the help they need, when they need it.

E-commerce Tools

Fantastico has a little something for everyone, including those who desire to sell products and services online.  You can set up a web-based storefront in no time with popular open-source programs such as Cube Cart, osCommerce and Zen Cart.  Shopping cart software can get pretty expensive but these highly functional applications won’t cost you a thing with Fantastico.

These are just a few of numerous scripts that come bundled with Fantastico.  Other programs include discussion boards, photo galleries, project management tools and website builders.  Fantastico contorts to the novice, allowing those with little to no technical skills to instantly enhance their web presence. One could say that cPanel is a trendsetter as more control panels are being developed with application installers that mimic the abilities of Fantastico.

There are numerous shopping carts available, most of which are created by different programming technologies.  This article will introduce you to some of the most common and detail their advantages and disadvantages.

ASP Shopping Carts

Short for Active Server Pages, ASP is a server-side programming language developed by Microsoft.  ASP is quite advantageous in the e-commerce field and shopping carts are no different.  The power of the language makes an ASP shopping cart easy to develop and maintain.  Most software scripted in this language gives you a comprehensive back office to easily manage all the components of your online business.  Like most technologies created by Microsoft, ASP shopping carts tend to be more expensive than those scripted in other languages.

CGI Shopping Carts

CGI is one of the oldest development tools and responsible for powering many of today’s active shopping carts.  The biggest advantage of CGI shopping carts is that they are compatible with all major web browsers.  The downside is that they can be difficult to maintain, sluggish and consume precious system resources.

Cookie Shopping Carts

Cookie shopping carts are both easy to setup and manage.  They tend to be faster than CGI shopping carts and consume fewer system resources.  The major disadvantage is that they are not compatible with web browsers that do not support cookies.  This makes a CGI shopping cart useless for customers who disable cookies in their browsers.

Java Shopping Carts

Many shopping carts are scripted in Java, a client-side language that offers advanced functionality beyond HTML.  Java shopping carts are feature-rich and visually appealing.  Because this type of software calls for you to build your online store inside of an applet, it is generally slower and more difficult to customize.

Javascript Shopping Carts

Javascript shopping carts are fast, easy to set up and manage.  They are also easy to customize and light on critical system features.  The major drawback is that they are not compatible with web browsers that do not support Javascript or cookies.  Additionally, a Javascript shopping cart is not equipped to handle larger e-commerce stores.

These are just a few of the many types of shopping carts on the market.  Regardless of the programming technologies behind the software, it is always best to choose a shopping cart that offers the features you need and supports the number of products you want to sell.

Place an Emphasis on the Product Before the Marketing Plan

When deciding on a niche, it is better to first settle on a market that has specific needs and then develop products or services to fulfill them.  So many people have failed at online business because they focused solely on marketing a product before finding someone who is actually looking for it.  This failure is typically the result of an insufficient demand or the fact that one or more competitors already have a stronghold over the market.

While the internet is prevalent, it isn’t the only medium where niche markets are important.  Several companies have gained success by establishing a market and then catering to that specific niche.  Microsoft develops operating systems and other software products based on the needs of PC users.  Adidas manufacturers footwear targeted for the athletic population.  These examples demonstrate how important it is to choose a niche market and then focus your marketing efforts around it.

Selecting a niche market doesn’t have to be a difficult task.  You can begin by focusing on a  market that ties into your area of expertise or interest.  Although the internet allows you to branch out and try many things, it is much easier to succeed with something you are passionate about.  This reduces the learning curve and the frustration that comes along with starting a business.  Instead of viewing it as tedious work, you are more likely to find your E-commerce as fun and hopefully prosperous.  You should also perform deep research in the market you are looking to break into.  This involves checking out competitors to get some ideas on the demand for certain products and services.  Additionally, you need to learn how consumers go about finding these items online such as what keywords they enter into search engines and so forth.

Where to Find Your Audience

Depending on who you are target, your niche market just be waiting in a forum, chat room or newsgroup based on something you specialize in.  By monitoring the activity in these sites, you can determine the needs of your niche market and discover what is in high demand.  This form of social networking can be quiet valuable to your business.

Settling on a niche market is the first critical step towards establishing an E-commerce business.  This is what sets the model for how your business will operate and develop into the future.  By taking a little time to figure out exactly what consumers are after, you can market your products or services accordingly and increase the probability of succeeding.