If you want to set up an ecommerce site for your business then you should be ready to part with a considerable amount of money for setting up an ecommerce website. Many business owners hesitate to take their business online because of the costs involved. We need to find cost effective solutions to meet our ecommerce website needs. One of the best ways of dealing with this problem is to find a free osCommerce template that can be customized to suit our specific needs.
Making use of free ecommerce software will bring down our costs dramatically. We can even get ecommerce hosted solution that matches our needs. These are some of the ways of cutting down the costs involved in setting up an ecommerce website.
We can find our free osCommerce templates at Ezosc.com. We will not only find free osCommerce template here, we can also download the entire ecommerce software free of cost. This software will take care of both the frontend and the backend needs of our ecommerce site. There are hundreds of free osCommerce templates available here. These templates can be further customized to meet our specific needs. Ezosc.com uses STS system template for osCommerce.
The free ecommerce software that we find here provides comprehensive ecommerce solution. We will be able to accept all types of billing solutions, provide multiple shipping options and set up multiple payment options. Normally when we download free ecommerce software online, they will have a number of limitations and number of drawbacks. We will not face such problems with the ecommerce software that we download at Ezosc.com. They provide highly customizable, flawless ecommerce solutions. We do not have to spend thousands of dollars in setting up our custom ecommerce stores. Ezosc.com has over 15 years of experience in providing ecommerce solutions to small, medium and large companies. We can take advantage of their experience by downloading their free ecommerce software and free osCommerce template.
Ezosc.com also offers ecommerce hosted solution for busy entrepreneurs who cannot be bothered dealing with multiple companies for their website and for hosting. At Ezosc.com, we get all in one ecommerce hosted solutions that meet all our ecommerce needs seamlessly.
You will be able to download the ecommerce software at www.ezosc.com. You can either go for free ecommerce solution or for paid hosted ecommerce solutions. The hosted ecommerce solutions are very competitively priced and they come with a host of useful features. You can download your free ecommerce software in just few clicks. The free ecommerce software is easy to install and it can be installed by any one. You need not be a programmer to have your software installed. The ecommerce software comes with installation instructions that are easy to follow.
The hosted solutions come with the SEO friendly URL feature, which is very important to rank well in the search engines. By far, this is the cheapest and the most reliable ecommerce solution that you can find online. For downloading your free copy of the ecommerce software visit www.ezosc.com.
Choosing the right shopping cart is one of the most crucial steps to making your online business a success. Your customers need to be able to purchase your product(s) as easily as possible, with a sense of security. For the business owner, the software should be simple to use, with lots of useful features and great customer support when needed.
We reviewed 22 of the leading shopping carts programs to help you find the program that will improve your chances of reaching your sales goals.
Below are the criteria TopTenREVIEWS used to rate shopping cart software:
Feature Set – The features range from a simple shopping cart to accounting and inventory functions. The programs that offered the most features and in turn, the most flexibility received high scores in this area. The most important goal is to find the program that includes desired features at a desirable cost.
Ease of Use – Good programs are easy for the entrepreneur and the customer to use. Wizards are helpful in webpage and storefront development, menus and help should be easily assessable and presented in a logical manner.
Ease of Setup – The software should install quickly and without errors. If it is a program that is accessed online, it should be easy to get to and use.
Help/Documentation – Excellent customer and technical support is paramount. The program should offer inner program support in help menus, user manuals, FAQs pages or other methods. The manufacture should offer support through telephone, email, mail or chat. The help should be useful and prompt.
Once your have your DBA (”Doing Business As”) established, a bank account open, market desirable products and the perfect shopping cart software, you may be well on your way to a successful Internet business. If you’re already in business, but are not happy with your shopping cart program or have out grown it, look into a new program that will help you manage all of your concerns more efficiently.
We recommend http://www.ezosc.com
Don’t let the name fool you, shopping cart software is a lot more than just a cart. Good shopping cart software can help your Internet business in other capacities as well, including:
Payment Processing – Many programs offer credit card processing as well as check, COD or other methods of possessing payments.
Webpage Design – Many merchants are not web designers, so some programs will include wizards to help you build your webpage without requiring you to know HTML.
Storefront Design – Store front wizards incorporate templates or other tools to help you set up your storefront.
Inventory Control – Good programs will keep track of your inventory and generate reports.
Shipping – Nearly all software offer a shipping tool that calculates shipping costs for customers based on parameters that you set, some can even link up to common shipping methods like FedEx.
Tax Calculation – Most shopping cart programs can calculate taxes, a valuable tool, especially since many states are considering requiring that merchants collect taxes for online sales.
Customer Management – Many shopping carts programs have features that will let customers view their previous purchases. The program will also recognize the customer when they come back for a return visit.
Marketing – A shopping cart is useless if you don’t sell anything. Marketing help can be invaluable, some programs offer information on affiliate programs and help with merchandising. Many are able to create coupons, gift certificates or other incentives. In addition, they provide sales reports and ‘hit’ or traffic information as well.
Security – Customers will not want to purchase online if they feel the website cannot protect their personal information. Many shopping cart programs will offer protection by encrypting information, processing credit cards through reputable processing services and by allowing customers to move through their program without having to download cookies.
On this site, you’ll find articles on shopping cart software and services and reviews so you can decide which software will best fit your business plans. At TopTenREVIEWS - We do the research so you don’t have to.™
We recommend http://www.ezosc.com
Thanks http://shopping-cart-review.toptenreviews.com/
Practical eCommerce recently asked industry insiders to share a great, innovative idea that could help an ecommerce firm. Here’s what ten of them had to say.
Rich Consumer Experiences Dominate
“Focus on immersive branding and marketing techniques that create unexpectedly fast, fun, and easy shopping experiences. Are your budgets caught up on technology or are you investing in creating that visceral connection to the consumer? What amazes us the most is that very few e-stores provide that connection.”
Michael Benadiba
CEO
OrderDynamics Corporation
Orderdynamics.com
Segment Audiences, Then Localize Messages
“Online retailers need to better segment online audiences. Once marketers understand an audience’s make-up and behavior, they can determine which online segments are useful, viable and profitable. They can start “localizing” their messages. Segmenting an audience into smaller groups ensures each receives the most relevant, personalized experience, information and offers.”
Rob Friedman
Executive Vice President
Digital Element
Digital-element.net
Provide Engaging Content
“You invest heavily to get shoppers to your product page, now focus on sales conversions. Product videos and other engaging content are proven to increase sales, and it’s not just for large merchants. They are available from many of your vendors at no charge to you. Ask them about it!”
Rick Martin
President and CEO
SellPoint
Sellpoint.net
Remove Disturbing Elements
“Remove any disturbing elements that could make any potential customer leave your site, like blinking banners and annoying flash-animations. Also make sure there’s not too much information on your site. Keep in mind most people only read the headlines.”
Roy Andre Tollefsen
Managing Director and Lead Designer
Trollweb.no and Silverthemes.com
Silverthemes.com
Engage Visitors With Video
“Video engages the user by providing demonstrations about your products or services. Show how your product works, different views, features and how it will benefit the user. Providing video is fairly easy and can be a major boost to your sales when done correctly. Search engines also like quality video.”
Byron Tabor
Owner
PracticalSports.com
Practicalsports.com
Create Simple and Fun Initiatives
“Great websites employ three main elements: content, community and commerce. Site owners need a meaningful metric for user participation on their sites. So create simple and fun initiatives for users and reward users that participate. It’s a great way to develop an audience for your site.”
Chris Cuellar
Founder
Apples 2 Apples
Apples2apples.com
Try USPS For International Shipping
“The fall of the dollar against foreign currencies is opening up a huge new export market for U.S. ecommerce merchants. United States Postal Service first class mail international and priority mail international delivery are a reliable and inexpensive way to ship export orders. Rates and how-to information are posted online at http://www.usps.com/business/international/welcome.htm.”
John Lindberg
President
eFulfillment Service
Efulfillmentservice.com
Target International Searches
“Increase your website targeted traffic with targeted localized search engine marketing campaigns in both natural and paid search efforts. Promote your product, service and business on domestic search engines, such as Google.fr, Google.de, Google.it, Baidu, Rambler, and others. Localize your product description, FAQs, tutorials, website, public relations and advertising campaigns.”
Adriana Iordan
Web Marketing Manager
Avangate
Avangate.com
Use Your Social Smarts
“Make product pages more social. Offer prizes to past customers who post the best reviews. Allow “track backs” to product pages that are linked to from blogs. Make it easy for users to share products on Facebook and Twitter. And have a public (though moderated) comment section for each product.”
Scott Smigler
President
Exclusive Concepts, Inc.
Exclusiveconcepts.com
Implement a Life Cycle Email Messaging Strategy
“Email marketing is much more effective when managed with a marketing strategy. An email life cycle plan will improve conversions, increase revenue spent per customer and help discover opportunities that are often missed due to failed communications. There is a little cost in setting this up and the rewards keep paying.”
Jason Prescott
CEO
Top Ten Wholesale
TopTenWholesale.com
Google Analytics provides a wealth of information. But many GA account holders do little beyond viewing their site’s daily traffic and trying to understand terms like “bounce rate.”
In this article, we will learn to segment data in GA to determine the number of paying customers entering a site from a specific keyword phrase and the landing page(s) they entered the site on.
Segmenting Keywords, Step By Step
First log into your Google Analytics account. The dashboard gives an important overview of how many visitors your site is getting and the overall bounce rate. But you must go beyond the dashboard to make meaningful changes to your website and develop your marketing strategy.
Click “Traffic Sources,” then “Keywords,” and then the “Ecommerce” tab. Scroll down the page and you will see the top keywords that users have typed and how these keywords relate to revenue. The column called “Ecommerce Conversion Rate” tells the specific number of sales for each keyword users searched. But, what can we do with this information?
Determine the Best Course of Action
- If you are running pay-per-click campaigns, you can shift spending from low-performers to high performing keywords.
- You can assess your site for the entry point (landing pages) of users who are searching for specific phrases.
- You can update the home page of your site to push the best-performing keywords more strongly.
In Google Analytics, click on a specific keyword to bring up the detail screen. By changing the dimension to “Landing Page,” you can further narrow the data to show the arrival points for visitors. And, if the prime landing page for your keyword does not generate many sales, a bit of search engine optimization work for the targeted term could quickly yield positive sales results.
Advanced Segmentation
You can take GA one step further by using the advanced segmentation to monitor the progress of individual keywords and see how your optimization efforts are paying off. You can create a wide range of segments using Google’s preset criteria or, better yet, define your own.
Click “Advanced Segments” and “Create new custom segment.” Next, expand the “Traffic Sources” heading and drag the “Keyword” dimension into the Reporting area on the right. Leave the Condition set to “Matches Exactly,” and for the Value, enter you keyword phrase. Title the segment and click “Create Segment.”
Now you have a permanently defined segment for all of your GA data that is organized around your chosen keyword. And, by using the Segmentation drop-down, it is possible to view data through the segmentation filter you have created.
Summary
Segmenting data is an effective way to fine-tune your traffic analysis. So, roll up your sleeves and start segmenting your Google Analytics data now.
osCommerce Online Merchant v3.0 Alpha 5 was scheduled for release by the end of February and has been postponed to ensure the quality of the release. It will now be released on Wednesday the 11th of March. This release also brings in a new roadmap and release strategy for the v3.x series.
Our focus has changed with this release from implementing additional features into the core to concentrating on the framework and to add the features to future releases. This allows v3.0 to be released sooner with a stable framework, and allows a much faster release cycle for new features compared to the previous “release every 6 months” release strategy.
This release is a stable production-ready release and will be the first supported release in the v3.x series. This release is still marked as an Alpha release due to framework changes that are still planned. We therefore recommend the installation of this release to those that are performing it themselves, and for hosting and service providers to wait until the final release of v3.0 before making it available to their customers.
The community add-ons site will be accepting uploads for this release and discussion channels will be available on the community support forums.
The v2.2 -> v3.0 Alpha 5 migration tool will be made available by the end of March for existing installations to use, and is only recommended to those that will be updating their installations leading up to the final v3.0 release.
The roadmap for v3.0 is now:
v3.0 Alpha 5
- Product Attributes Implementation
- Dynamic Table Listings (Administration Tool)
- Live Search (Administration Tool)
- Administration Tool sections now self-contained Applications
- Error Logging; both PHP and MySQL errors and warnings now logged (forced runtime usage of PHP E_ALL and MySQL STRICT_ALL_TABLES)
- Stabilized Framework
- Usage of JSON for RPC calls
- Inclusion of jQuery v1.3.2 and jQuery UI v1.6rc6
v3.0 Beta 1
- HTML E-Mails
- Purchase Without Account
- Frozen Framework
- Updated Frontend/GUI
- Upgrade from v2.2 and v3.0 Alpha 5
v3.0
- Bugfixes
- Finalize Updated Frontend/GUI
- Documentation
- Certified Modules
- Upgrade from v2.2 and v3.0 Beta 1
v3.1
- Backup/Import/Export Features
v3.2
- Gift Vouchers and Coupons
The v3.0 Alpha 5 release will also be the first osCommerce Online Merchant release using Git to attract an even greater wave of developers to help with add-ons and core framework improvements. Git is a distributed version control system which allows developers to clone and create branches on their own local development machines. A discussion channel will be made available on the community support forums to manage the discussions on clones, patches, and keeping up to date with everyones changes.
The Git development repository is hosted at:
http://github.com/osCommerce/oscommerce/
Developers, feel free to fork the git master branch now and keep up to date with the commits leading up to the release. Be ready to show the world your creativity in making osCommerce Online Merchant an even better e-commerce solution
This module adds Checkout by Amazon as a checkout option on your store, providing your customers with the same checkout experience available on Amazon.com.
Features of the module:
1. Customers can place orders using the same information available in their Amazon account. Amazon 1-Click® support is included
2. You can manage orders placed through Checkout by Amazon in the osCommerce admin UI
3. Shipping calculations can be done using flat rate, per item, table rate, zone rates and dynamic shipping carrier rates from UPS, USPS and FedEx
4. Tax calculations can be done using osCommerce tax settings
You can download the contribution at http://addons.oscommerce.com/info/6591
If you need help just visist the “Featured Providers” at https://payments.amazon.com/sdui/sdui/business?sn=fpspartners/thirdparty
Although many ecommerce merchants consider Amazon to be tough competitor, some online shopkeepers can boost sales and send traffic back to their own site using two of Amazon’s ecommerce services.
Selling on Amazon and Product Ads on Amazon are two Amazon services that many retail ecommerce businesses can use, taking advantage of Amazon’s brand and web traffic to improve sales. In this Ecommerce Know-How, I will describe these services, explain how to use them to improve your business, and point out the potential costs and pitfalls.
Selling on Amazon is Like a Comparison Shopping Site, But with More Traffic
According to Internet data company, comScore, Amazon.com had more than 54.5 million unique visitors from the U.S. alone in January 2009. That amounts to a lot of potential customers searching on Amazon for products of all kinds.
For a $39.99 monthly fee, Amazon will let almost any ecommerce merchant upload inventory to the Amazon site, either manually adding items, uploading them as a text file, or using a free Amazon application. Your products will be listed alongside similar or even identical products on sale from Amazon or your other competitors much the same way that shopping or price comparison tools list a number of sellers and their offer prices.
Any of Amazon’s 50 million monthly visitors can find and select your products, placing an order through the Amazon payment interface and shopping cart. This means that a customer might have products from your site, Amazon, and other online retailers all bundled together in one order. If that doesn’t bother you, this Amazon service can send a lot of orders to your store.
A Few Gotchas When Selling on Amazon
Although this service can be a powerful marketing tool, there are at least four things to watch out for when selling on Amazon.
First, Amazon can be particular about the products they list and offer little recourse when they (frequently) make a mistake. For example, Amazon refused to list a toy cap gun that I sell in one of my stores. I was told that it was a forbidden item. But my competitors had listed the identical toy. When I tried to communicate with Amazon, I was sent to a useless set of terms and conditions.
Second, Amazon will control the shipping prices, so you will need to pad your item’s price. Perhaps, as a ploy to get you to use Amazon’s own fulfillment services, selling on Amazon will force you into razor thin shipping prices, and make it impossible to recover the cost of your packaging materials. You can still turn a profit, but you’ll have to watch your margins very carefully.
Third, only list profitable items. Many of your competitors are not using this tool well; in fact, they are undercutting their own profits. Just as with price comparison sites, some merchants are offering their products too cheaply, don’t be part of the problem. List items with a reasonable profit margin built in; no one should treat ecommerce like a charity.
Finally, don’t forget to factor in the monthly fee. $39.99 is very expensive. If you are not getting 100 or more additional sales each month from Amazon, you’re not getting your money’s worth.
Place Ads on Amazon
If you would rather not list your items on a competitor’s site, but still want to take advantage of Amazon’s traffic, consider placing pay-per-click (PPC) ads that will send customers back to your store.
The service is very similar to Google AdWords, but in many ways provides a more targeted audience. Amazon does require some minimum bids for popular categories. When this article was written, those minimums included:
Apparel and accessories 30-to-50 cents per click
Baby 15-to-25 cents per click
Computers and peripherals 55 cents to $1 per click
Electronics and office 40 cents to $1.25 per click
Furniture 40 cents per click
Health and beauty 60 cents to $1 per click
Home and garden 15-to-70 cents per click
Jewelry and watches 20-to-75 cents per click
Sports and outdoors 25 cents to $1 per click
Tools and home improvement 30 to 50 cents per click
Toys 15-to-25 cents per click
Some categories require preapproval from Amazon before you can post ads, others will be up and running just a few minutes after you set them up.
Summing Up
Many ecommerce sites can take advantage of Amazon’s millions of monthly visitors by either listing products directly on Amazon or by running targeted PPC ads.
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