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Four Hot E-commerce Tips that Payoff

With so many entrepreneurs and businesses profiting from the internet, it should come as no surprise that more hopeful people are investing in e-commerce solutions.  However, you should know that there are many online businesses out there and very few of them obtain the success they were looking for.  This serves as proof that simply having an online storefront does not mean you will be successful.  Luckily, there are some proven approaches that can be employed to help ensure that your e-commerce site is just as fruitful as the next.

1.) Create a Professional Design

Several beginners make their first critical mistake at the design stage.  Being that HTML programming is fairly easy to master, some develop the gumption to go at it alone and decide to build their own website from the ground up.  Even though web technology has made it much more feasible to create a site with little to no experience, there are many reasons why you may want to leave this task in the hands of someone else.  Building a fully functioning website from scratch can be a hassle and very costly when considering that you will have to invest countless hours on time that could have been spent focusing on something else.  By outsourcing this part of the project to a professional design or development expert, you can devote your time and energy to developing a sound business strategy.

2.) Make Easy Navigation and Usability a Priority

Creating an e-commerce site that offers simple navigation and usability is a must.  You can get a better understanding by viewing your website as the aisle of a retail store.  In an ideal environment, all items are organized accordingly and easy to find.  Customers should have no trouble finding what ever it is they want to purchase.  The same holds true for an online storefront.  Even it is a measly checkout button, it is should be made visible and easy to find on your site.

3.) Don’t Forget Your Inventory

There are some online store owners that get so caught up in running their business, they forget about other key areas such as inventory.  You can avoid this by cataloging all the items you have for sale.  Be sure to update your inventory on a regular basis to avoid scenarios where a customer tries to purchase something that is out of stock.  This can help you salvage a sale and elude embarrassment as well.

4.) Incorporate Customer Friendly Features

One surefire way to succeed with an e-commerce venture is to incorporate and make effective use of desirable features that will benefit your customers.  These features could range from essentials such as an easy to use shopping cart and SSL certificate to novelties like a site map and talking avatars.  You may also want to consider rich media features such as animation and video or something simple and effective like auto-responders to deliver immediate responses.  By pampering your customers, you can increase the probability of a pleasurable shopping experience that keeps them coming back for more.

Know What to Look for in a Shopping Cart

The shopping cart you choose is a decision that can either make or break your online business.  In many instances, the difference between a successful e-commerce store and a failure is not the actual products or services, but how the products and services are sold.  To keep you from falling on the unfavorable side of things, we have provided some important features to look for in your shopping cart application.

SEO-Friendly

As an online business owner, SEO (search engine optimization) should be one of your top priorities.  While most site owners have a part in creating intriguing content, they often have less impact on the design and search engine indexing.  If this sounds like your situation, then choosing an SEO-friendly shopping cart is essential.  Signs of a good cart with these qualities is one that automatically produces keyword-rich URLs relative to your site or items.

Coupon Support

It doesn’t matter what you sell, it is almost guaranteed that your customers are looking for a deal.  The best way to attract this type of audience is with coupons.  Numerous reports show that customers are increasingly on the hunt for online coupons, so a shopping cart that supports coupon codes will likely do you some good.  Without this feature, you are doing nothing but limiting your potential.

Cross-Selling Functionality

Cross-selling is the concept of selling customers additional related products to increase your total per-checkout revenue.  A perfect example would be recommending accessories to go along with the PC hardware you sell.  The shopping cart you choose should offer cross-selling functionality as an either a semi or fully automated process.  The best e-commerce platforms have systems that associate products and dynamically place related items on the corresponding product and checkout pages.

Customer Reviews

Genuine customer reviews make a great way to encourage more sales.  These reviews are like having a peer recommend your store to potential customers.  Think of it as a way of allowing your customers to market for you.  A shopping cart equipped with this feature should either support a review system from within, or allow you to connect to a third-party tool such as PowerReviews or similar.

Sharing and Recommendations

Any potential customer visiting your website should have the ability to share product details via email or in other ways.  Let’s say a teen is interested in one of your products and wants to let their mom or dad know they really want this particular item as a birthday gift.  To make this a seamless process, your store should provide the teen with any easy way to send notification to their parents without having to cut and paste the details.  A good shopping cart application will include a sharing feature, typically as a part of wish list system that calls for the customer to complete some type of registration in order to use it.

Today’s e-commerce shopping carts are loaded with features and these are just a few of many that we believe are absolute deal breakers.  The good thing is that with hundreds of applications to choose from, you have the luxury to be very selective.

How to Install osCommerce and Activate SSL Through cPanel

osCommerce is one of the most widely used e-commerce shopping cart programs available on the market today.  It is also an application that can be easily installed via Fantastico in your cPanel control panel.  To help you in maximizing the benefits of this software, we  will not only walk you through the steps of installing osCommerce, but also show you how to configure it to use with your dedicated or shared SSL certificate to ensure that your website transactions are secure.

osCommerce Installation

- Login into your cPanel account and click on the Fantastico icon at the bottom of the main page.

- Navigate to the “E-commerce” section and click on the “osCommerce” link.

- Next, click on the “New Installation” link.

- Now you must go through a multi-step process in order to define the installation location:

Step 1: Choose your domain from the provided drop-down menu.

Step 2: Enter the name of the directory where you want osCommerce to be installed.

Keep in mind that the “install in directory” field is the one part where several users make critical mistakes.  Enter a single phrase of the new folder that will be created for the osCommerce application.  If you try to add dashes, the installation will fail every time.

Step 3: Return back and double check the information you entered in the above field.  If you want your customers to access your store when visiting “http://yoursite.com,“ you would then leave the “Install in Directory” field blank.  On the other hand, if you already have an existing website, you want to enter a given directory name in that field.  For example, if you decide to use “store” as the name of the directory, customers would access your osCommerce store by visiting “http://yoursite.com/store”.

- After entering the required information for the installation destination, enter a user name and password for your osCommerce administrative area.

- Next, enter the name of your store, an owner name, and valid email address.

Activate SSL

Once you have the installation destination squared away, the proceeding steps are self explanatory.  The SSL process deserves a little more detailed explanation.

- Set the “Use SSL” option to”Yes”

- Enter the hostname for your secure server.

If you have a dedicated IP address and SSL certificate for your website, simply enter your domain name in the next field.  If not, just use the server name entered above.

- Choose the information you want to require from your customers.  You will see that these options are pretty straightforward and can be either set to “Yes or “No.”

- After entering the information, click on the “Install osCommerce” tab.

- Lastly, on the next page click “Finish installation”.

You have now successfully installed the osCommerce shopping cart program equipped with an SSL certificate for security.  Now all you have to do is the click the provided link or type the appropriate URL into your browser to log in and set up your online store.

Introducing the nopCommerce Shopping Cart

Though you will not find it on too many store shelves, open-source software is a major hit in the internet world and the web hosting market is solid proof.  These applications are highly capable of powering websites and all the complex operations that come along with them.  Some of the most widely used open-source software programs are e-commerce shopping carts as they allow just about anyone to open up their own web-based store.  There are several carts on the market but few of them are as unique as nopCommerce.

What is nopCommerce?

nopCommerce is a stable, fully customizable, highly usable e-commerce system.  What makes this open-source application stand out from all the rest is the underlying technologies.  Unlike most similar carts scripted in open-source languages such as PHP or Perl, this one is written in Microsoft’s proprietary ASP.NET 3.5 and thrives off a MS SQL back-end database.  This gives nopCommerce the best of both worlds has it is extremely powerful and very cost effective.  In fact, the shopping cart is totally free to use.

nopCommerce Features and Capabilities

The nopCommerce software is easy to use and perfectly suited for online shop owners who have outgrown their existing systems.  How easy to use is it?  nopCommerce can be installed, setup and maintained by virtually anyone possessing the basic computing and website administration skills.  A secure and scalable e-commerce platform, it offers a user-friendly interface and administration tools that allow you to effectively manage your online storefront and customers.  You have control over features such as discounts, coupons, wish lists, tax options, shipping methods and much more.  nonCommerce is capable of handling multiple languages and supports most of the popular gateways including Authorize.net, 2Checkout, Google Checkout and PayPal among others.

nopCommerce provides a catalog frontend and allows complete administration on the back-end, delivering everything you need to quickly set up a fully functioning professional storefront.

This e-commerce solution comes integrated with a variety of great features that are easy to use for the new and inexperienced user, yet powerful enough to suite the needs of seasoned merchants with the most demanding operations.  Offering a built-in shopping cart, easy catalog management, shipping calculation, credit card processing, template customization and a wealth of other powerful tools, there isn’t much you can’t do with this amazing e-commerce system.  The nopCommerce package comes with access to a well organized base of resources, technical support and valuable information provided by a fast growing community.

A Solid Choice for Open-source

The fact that you will not find too many open-source programs boasting the ASP.NET tag makes nopCommerce something truly special.  This flexible e-commerce system is growing rapidly in popularity, making it easier to land a web hosting provides that offers support for the application.  Because the software is relatively new, it remains to be seen whether or not nopCommerce can hold a candle to well known open-source shopping carts such as osCommerce, Agora and Cube Cart.  However, the software has generated a lot of buzz in a very short time and as of now, industry reviews are indicating that this e-commerce platform is all good.

Power Your Store with Open-Source Shopping Carts

If you want to sell your own products or services online, then you will need a shopping cart program to facilitate those sales.  The number of available shopping carts is tremendous and even better, some of the best software is of an open-source variety and totally free to use.  Here are some of the most common open-source shopping carts you may encounter on the market.

PrestaShop

PrestaShop is a comprehensive, professional-grade shopping cart that is easy to use and setup.  The software offers a fully featured back-end interface to maintain your inventory, orders, shipping options and customers in real-time.  It is also highly customizable as you can incorporate your own modules.  PrestaShop keeps security in mind but securely transmitting customer payments directly to your bank account.

Magneto

Magneto is a robust e-commerce solution that offers unparalleled flexibility and control.  This software is so well designed and functional that you would never think it came from an open-source project.  Unlike other shopping carts, this one gives you clean URLs and SEO-friendliness right out the box, bypassing the need to make additional configurations.  Magneto has a scalable architecture and seamless integrate with various third-party applications.  Additionally, it gives you the benefit of both community and professional technical support.

CubeCart

CubeCart is one of the most popular shopping carts around.  Although it is free to download and use, you are forced to leave the developer’s copyright notice in your footer.  That disadvantage aside, CubeCart offers a plethora of features with support for most of the major gateways and shipping options.  The software comes with decent support from an active community that regularly contribute plugins to the cart.

Agora

Written in the Perl programming language and driven by a MySQL database, Agora is another popular choice for open-source shopping carts.  Very customizable, it features a built-in CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) manager that lets you control the look of the shopping cart as well as setup options ranging from a simple template-based storefront to more complex visual designs.  Agora supports unlimited products, a wealth of shipping and payment options, up to four tax zones at once and much more.

Zen Cart

Zen Cart is a user-friendly shopping cart that caters to beginners.  This is one software that actually focuses on the shoppers and store owners opposed to developers.  Zen Cart is easy to use and supports multiple shipping and payment options.  It also allows you to easily provide discounts and coupons to your customers.

osCommerce

The wide variety of features in osCommerce enables you to set up an online store fairly quickly.  It supports multiple currencies and also lets your customers print their invoices directly from the order screen.  osCommerce gets the backing of a superb community who provide ongoing support and make contributions to the project.

These are just some of your choices for open-source shopping carts.  Rest assured, there are many more to choose from.  While you can probably pay for something better, numerous users are doing just fine running their store with these free versions.