During the last 3 years, the providers of ecommerce software have gone to great lengths to provide many helpful features to help merchants sell more . Many shopping cart not only come feature packed but became very well designed.
Here are eight ecommerce software features that every merchant should use.
Automated E-mail
Automated e-mail is great as it saves time and if used correctly, it can improve sales by as much as 15%. As an example, using automated e-mail to salvage a cancelled order. You can use the automated e-mail feature to inform purchasers about their product order status, product in stock status and also use it to distribute newsletters.
Cross sell
This feature works the same way as those tiny shelves that lure you to buy stuff as you queue toward the till. Amazon has mastered the art of online cross selling thanks to their advanced algorithm that tracks and responds to purchasing trends. Use this feature to help to increase sales.
Figures And Data
How does one know what visitors are looking when they land on your internet site? A way to find out is by clicking on your ‘Search Words Used ‘ feature. This feature stores all the search phrases which are entered into the search box on your internet site.
A well provided shopping cart with adequate numbers and information could help you better plan your campaigns and change your store to meet your customers wants.
Free ecommerce templates
If you’re just starting out in ecommerce, chances are high that you are on a humble budget. If that’s the case, pick a shopping cart provider which offers engaging free ecommerce templates. This can save you a lot of money - as much as $1000 - on design charges. Change to a custom template once you are able to afford it.
Free Live Chat Software
Another good feature to have is a live chat software. This is a good conversion tool as you can address customer inquiries immediately and so improve chances of conversion.
S.E.O Friendly
SEO is extremely important unless you do not desire your store to be found. SEO stands for SEO and it essentially means optimizing your store for search websites. If your store has been correctly optimised, search websites will index it and accurately match it to search questions. having a shopping cart that has inbuilt tools to help you optimize your store would be of big benefit.
Mobile Commerce
Figures have shown that more people are taking to mobile devices to buy on the internet. The trend is clear in Japan and Korea and is growing gradually in APAC countries. Make sure your shopping cart software has this feature so you can have access to this market.
Facebook Commerce
If people spent the same quantity of time trying to solve the problems of the world as they do on Facebook, there would be peace on earth, I should think. Facebook began as a place for students to stay in contact with each other but has grown into a giant virtual mall where people hangout, watch videos and shop.
With over half a bln users and 25 percent of which say they would buy from a Facebook shop, do ensure that the ecommerce software you choose has a Facebook store app which will enable you to leverage your store’s Facebook presence.
In summary,
- Make sure these features come free with the subscription.
- Before subscribing to an ecommerce software, have a look at that feature list first.
- Some features, such as the Automated Email, can be tweaked for better results.
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Filed under Ecommerce And SEO News and Tips by ecommerceware
Ecommerce solutions have become more and more powerful, with features that help merchants market their products in a rather more efficient manner. With such a lot of features available, merchants sometimes get carried away and do things which might be negative to their stores.
Here are three mistakes to avoid on your online shopping cart solution powered web store.
Abusing The Content Slider
When used properly, the content slider can be a great gizmo to get the attention of visitors to push your services and goods. However , many merchants misuse this clever tool and end up negating its purpose.
The content slider works best with 5 slides or less. This is due to the fact that, many visitors are typically quite impatient and would potentially not wait to see all the slides contained in the content slider.
The nicest thing to do is organize your slides before including it in the slider. Arrange it so that the most vital slide goes first followed by the second most vital and so on .
If you have 10 slides. Make a few sets of sliders. You may repeat the important slides and replace the less crucial ones in the other sliders. Change your sliders every day or so or so. Changing sliders is simply a matter of removing and pasting of a short code with most well designed online shopping cart solution.
Another mistake merchants make with content sliders is making them too big. Content sliders shouldn’t be so big that they use up the entire top fold of a page. Think about content sliders as reports of a page. There should be sufficient space below the content slider to display a few products or other call-to-action images or text.
Not Offering One-Page Checkout As A Choice
Many merchants don’t offer the One-Page Checkout as an option for their clients because that option comes at a cost. The One-Page Checkout is a quick checkout process because it doesn’t require the shopper to register at the store. The registration process often needs the client to leave an e-mail address. Merchants use this address for lucrative post purchase promoting initiatives, e.g. The distribution of newsletters.
Omitting this option might basically cost you a number of sales. The base line for any net store is to make as many sales as practicable. There will be some who don’t mind bothering to register. But there will also be those who need to get things done as fast as practicable. So including this option might not only get you a sale, but probably a return purchaser as well .
Not Following Up On Cancelled Orders
Some reports have advised that as many twenty five percent of orders are aborted for one reason or another. Sadly , many merchants pay no real interest in trying to salvage this group of shoppers even though there is a feature in most ecommerce solutions to address this.
Many ecommerce software have an automated e-mail feature to enable the store to contact these purchasers and attempt to convince them to rethink completing their aborted order. Research has demonstrated that up to 30% of aborted orders can be saved this way. Though the automated email includes a prepared template, a little modifying by merchants to make it sound a bit more enticing and sincere can do wonders.
To sum up,
- Limit the number of slides on your content slider to a maximum of 5
- Offer customers the quick checkout option
- Make sure your content slider does not take up too much of the first fold
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Filed under Ecommerce And SEO News and Tips by ecommerceware
It’s so hard these days for beginners to decide on which ecommerce solutions provider to go with. To make it worse, there are so many shop cart packages to choose from. If you’re not sure which package to choose, calm down and take a big breath. Then glance at the feature list of the various packages.
If you’re thinking of opening your very first store, take my advice and skip the higher tier shopper cart packages. Try to adhere to ecommerce solutions which are priced around USD60 each month. To my mind, this segment offers the highest value for money vis features for the price you pay.
But prior to signing up for a no-cost trial, have a look at the feature list. Any shopping cart worth their salt would have at 90% of the features mentioned below already available.
Security
Would you buy at a site you suspect wasn’t secure? I did not think so. Ensure that the checkout cart you decide to subscribe to comes with entirely encrypted 256-bit Secure Sockets Layer ( SSL ) protection. You will need this to be certain that your data as well as those of your shopper are always protected.
Disk Drive Space
Ensure you have enough disk drive space to host your photographs as well as other data on your store. For a new store, about 5GB of space should do. If you need more space, do not upgrade your subscription package pointlessly. It might be cheaper to just purchase more drive space.
Since pictures take up the most drive space, always optimize your photographs before uploading to your store. Also, host videos on video sharing sites so they do not take up your disk drive space.
Bandwidth
If your store is new, it is extremely unlikely that you are going to be experiencing heavy traffic. Therefore 6GB of bandwidth should more than suffice . As with disk drive space, if you need more bandwidth, see if you can purchase more bandwidth rather than upgrading your package.
Number of Products
Most new merchants do not have many products on their stores. Typically an ecommerce store has about 500 products. But just in case, ensure your subscription covers more than the average number of products. 1000 products is a good bet.
Payment Processors
Many stores use at least two payment processors to accept payments. One for world shoppers and one for local ones. The problem for many merchants is finding a payment processor for local customers. So before signing up, check the payment processor list to work out if they have what you need is listed there. If it’s not, inquire if the payment processor you need can be integrated for free or perhaps for a nominal sum.
Product Zoom Tool
If you’re selling products containing fine details. You ought to use this feature to supply a close-up look of your products to focus on finer details. This can be a deal breaker for many purchasers.
Fast Checkout
Fast checkout or one-page checkout is great for buyers who desire no worries purchases. The drawback of this feature is that merchants would not be well placed to collect valuable shoppers ‘ e-mail for followup campaigns and the patron may not be able to receive order updates through email.
Turning on this feature is just a matter of picking a check box in most shopping cart software.
Drop Ship
Obtaining the services of a drop shipper is a workable choice for new merchants who do not have any provider contacts, do not have space to store inventory and do not have the resources to pack and ship the products. Even seasoned merchants use products from drop shippers to expand their range of products. Please remember that you may not be able to get the very best margins from drop shippers but you get a lot convenience as an alternative.
1 or 2 ecommerce solutions actually come with a drop ship service already integrated into their system. This indicates that no integration charge will be needed if you select to utilize the drop ship service, only the monthly service charge charges to the drop apply.
To summarise,
- Do not be afraid to tweak features which you think can improve your bottom line.
- New merchants should always try to get the best value for money on their ecommerce solutions subscription.
- Ensure that you are getting these features for free.
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Filed under Ecommerce And SEO News and Tips by ecommerceware
September 30, 2011
New Web Store Owners Can Money On Ecommerce Software With These Three Advice
New merchants are simply interested in plausibly reasonable ecommerce software but they shortly finish up laying out more than they budgeted for. These extra charges usually stem from exceeding the allocated drive space or bandwidth for a particular ecommerce package. In several cases, new merchants pay for packages which they don’t even need .
Nevertheless there methods to remedy these issues and they are not that difficult to execute.
Select Right Package
Shopper cart software suppliers typically offer about five packages to match the needs of different merchants. If you are only starting, try not to opt for the most pricey package because you think you need to get the best package out there.
Costlier shopping cart software packages are often intended for bigger stores which have plenty of products and use a lot of bandwidth. The more pricey packages have been in particular tailored so that merchants of larger stores would see it as top value for money and therefore , wouldn’t see it as being pricey at all .
For merchants of smaller stores, don’t worry too much about signing up for a package which costs $100 or less. ecommerce software have come a ways so although you are paying just $100 for a shopping cart solution, you are getting everything you’d need to run a successful web store.
So simply by selecting the best package, you might be saving as much as $100 on ecommerce subscriptions. You might save rather more if you have programming data and have a lot of time to work on your store by utilizing one of many open source or free ecommerce software available.
Optimize Your Images For The Web
Many new merchants make the newbie mistake of not optimising their photographs before uploading them to their store. You don’t need high definition images for the web because it makes your internet site slow to download, which could get your store punished by search engines, and it takes up lots of drive space and uses up a large amount of bandwidth as well .
So before uploading your pictures to your store, use an image revising software to optimize your pictures for the web. This is going to help you ensure your disk space and bandwidth use is in the limits of your subscribed shop cart package.
Use Product Options
Another greenhorn mistake which many new merchants make is creating mandatory product pages with their shopping cart software. The more reasonable ecommerce software packages come with a controlled number of products you can have on your store. So, having needless product pages could use your product allotment.
If you have products which come with different options such as colors or sizes, use the product options feature. This way you will only need one product page, if your product comes in five different colors, as opposed to having five separate product pages for fundamentally the exact same item.
To summarize,
- Optimize your images so that they take up less space
- Do not create unnecessary pages
- Upgrading certain parts of the package might be cheaper than upgrading the whole package
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Filed under Ecommerce And SEO News and Tips by ecommerceware
September 29, 2011
Ecommerce Solutions Could Aid Your Traditional Business With These 3 Avenues
Ecommerce solutions is proving to be a favored strategy for traditional brick and mortar corporations to grow and expand. More and more offline stores are finding that having an internet presence can prove terribly favourable, both as a way of inflating revenue and well as brand building.
Here are three of the important reasons why ecommerce solutions are so attractive to merchants.
Minimal Cost Of Expansion
The traditional way of expanding a business is to open up a new branch at a new locale or buy up a competitor. Though, there’s nothing wrong with this strategy, it does use a large amount of resources.
Ecommerce solutions not only affords you the chance to grow your company, it allows you to do so at a comparatively low cost. Most ecommerce shopping cart subscriptions cost rather less than $100 a month in monthly subscription fees. And this are the ones that come with all the bells and whistles, as well as consumer support. For those of you who are far more technology aware, free or open-source ecommerce solutions is a choice.
Larger Market
The top selling point of ecommerce solutions is the indisputable fact that, if you opt to, you can sell your products globally. You are not limited to just a express location or medium.
Most ecommerce shopping cart now come with special shopping applications to allow folk to buy on your Facebook page. Folks can also shop directly from their mobile telephones with aid from mobile shopping applications. If marketed correctly, your sales could increase at an exponential rate thanks to these new online shopping avenues.
Having a bigger market also means you could enjoy better scaling savings when sourcing products because you’d be ordering in bigger quantities. You could then choose to sell at the very same price and enjoy bigger margins or pass the savings over to your customers.
Open 24 / seven
An alternative way to increase money is have your store open 24 / seven. Nonetheless this is not always possible or possible for varied reasons. For one, no one truly shops for shoes at 3am so keeping a conventional shoe store open night and day would be counter productive.
if you’ve got an online version of your conventional store available, you don’t have to worry about this because when 1 part of the world sleeps, the other part is awake and ready to shop.
The nicest thing about having shopping cart software working for you is that you do not have to pay it overtime fees. You don’t have to hire an additional person simply to run your web store because it is so easy to run and it doesn’t take up much time to do so , save for the beginning part, of course. All that it needs is merely a little coaching for any person to run an online store.
To summarise,
- Shopping cart software is the doorway to a worldwide market
- Shopping cart software lets you keep your store open for 24 hours a day without having to pay overtime fees
- Ecommerce solutions is an affordable way to expand an existing business
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Filed under Ecommerce And SEO News and Tips by ecommerceware
September 24, 2011
Why The HP Pavilion Elite HPE-180t Is The Top Multimedia Computer For You
Hewlett-Packard, or more widely recognized nowadays as HP, earned a reputation for great innovation in the computer industry. As time passed by, HP just turned into a mass manufacturer of commodity computers. Today, the company has returned to being an important maker of numerous consumer electronics. The company has made one of the finest multimedia computers on the market nowadays called the HP Pavilion Elite HPE-180t. It utilizes the processing power of Intel’s i7 CPU, and fuses it with a lot of storage and available RAM. This gives sufficient power to make slide shows or films, and also edit high-definition content.
The HPE-180t’s base processor will fit majority of people’s demands but you have the choice to upgrade it to a more powerful computer. The HP Pavilion Elite HPE-180t’s standard processor is the astonishingly fast Intel i7 920 Quad Core processor that clocks in at an impressive 2.66 GHz. In addition to a fast processor, the HP Pavilion Elite HPE-180t comes with 8GB of DDR3-1066MHz of RAM which is the most efficient type of RAM available nowadays. This amount of memory is nearly unheard of for a basic PC but you can still put in even more RAM if 8GB is still not adequate.
The graphics processor that almost all PCs come with do not make for a terrific multimedia machine, so the HP Pavilion Elite HPE-180t has a couple of better choices to choose from. The ATI Radeon HD 4650 graphics card featuring 1GB of video memory comes with the basic price. Nonetheless, if that isn’t adequate, you can upgrade the graphics card to the ATI Radeon HD 4850 or the NVIDIA GeForce GT 220, both come with 1GB of video memory.
A third graphics card choice is the NVIDIA GeForce GTX 260, which has 1.8GB of video memory. This option is chiefly for the true-blue gamers, but works every bit as well for processing multimedia. Plus, you will get the LightScribe 16x CD/DVD burner/reader in the basic version of the HP Pavilion Elite HPE-180t. The HP Pavilion Elite HPE-180t will burn to every recordable formats, and has an option that will allow you to also burn Blu-ray disks. The HP Pavilion Elite HPE-180t likewise features 7.1 channel surround sound. Like all others, the computer can be upgraded for a more impressive sound experience.
Other standard features are HP’s multimedia keyboard and optical mouse. In addition, you can get a wireless keyboard and mouse.If you wish to go wireless, you can opt for a wireless keyboard and wireless mouse. The basic model price does not include a monitor although you will be able to find several terrific packaged deals. Although the standard price may seem a little high compared to other computers, you should be able to find coupons at HP’s own web site. This is not a limited edition personal computer so you should be able to locate a great deal.
If you are a multimedia enthusiast, then this HP computer has a great deal to love about. The basic PC can satisfy most needs, but the numerous upgrades will offer a lot of enhancements for your multimedia enjoyment. Without a doubt, the HP Pavilion Elite HPE-180t is a very good PC for the cost, particularly for multimedia.
Jessica M. Henderson writes about computer along with Father of the Bride Speeches. To know more about Wedding Toast by Father of the Bride click here.
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September 5, 2011
Web Hosting: Services, Prices, Uptime And More
Web hosting is the first step to getting yourself, or your business online. Web Hosting companies are dime a dozen and hence, finding them isn’t tough. Finding the right one, however, is a totally different ballgame.
Your present needs, website’s popularity and the environment should ideally dictate your choice. If you are just starting a personal blog, you don’t really need a lot. Shared hosting will do the job for you. If you want a startup’s website, you should ideally pick something that can scale up as and when needed. Price is an obvious issue too. Dedicated server should be the best option if you’re planning to create multiple websites, or have a few that use quite a bit of resources.
For someone who is new to all of this, all these terms (shared, dedicated) would be alien. It is important thus that you educate yourself as much as possible. Shared hosting is the type of hosting where you’re sharing server space with other people. This will of course compromise on performance however, you won’t make a dent in your pocket. When you get dedicated server space, i.e. no one else is using it, that’s dedicated server. It is pricey and gives the very best functionality. It’s designed for all who have extremely high traffic websites or multiple sites and want fantastic performance.
In picking an online host for yourself, there are a few points to take into account. Let us check out a few of them -
1. Support - This is incredibly important, especially if you’re a starter. Website hosting, server settings, etc can get a tiny bit ‘geeky’ if you don’t know your way around it. The good news is, lots of the top web hosting companies provide outstanding support. Hostgator, as an example, has excellent and quick customer service.
2. Their Plans - Several website hosts guarantee unlimited bandwidth, infinite storage and limitless everything. These are nothing but over the moon promises that are never going to be fulfilled. Once you start reaching a certain cap, you’ll get a notification from their website to either update your plan or they will likely shut you down. For websites that don’t experience considerable traffic, these packages will be okay. Having said that, if you’re looking for high end plans, do not fall for these.
3. The price - Hosting plans, more or less, have a similar price-points across numerous companies. There are some which charge a lot less which alone should be a signal to steer clear of them. When you go for top web hosting companies in the market, you could possibly shell out a couple of extra bucks but they also have a history to maintain as well, so you can be confident of good support.