Archive for the ‘ E-commerce Application Development ’ Category

Top 5 Pitfalls To Avoid While Starting An E-Commerce Website

Wednesday, September 28th, 2011

There are thousands of online stores and thousands of e-commerce sites over the internet. The world of e-commerce is very competitive. If your business is online, make sure that you set it  up correctly. Maintain a checklist. Well, if you don’t, others will! Let’s take a look at five such common areas to look at and maintain a very basic checklist.

  • The most important part of your online store is your shopping cart. Ensure that product selection and check out process is easy.
  • Next important part is the payment gateway. Select the most secure one.
  • Provide appropriate product information and maintain a good return policy too.
  • Abide by internet security policies for your website right from the development stage.
  • Speed in loading the website is an important factor in terms of SEO as well as website visitors.

Why Magento For An E-commerce Solution

Thursday, September 15th, 2011

You plan on an online store. You have a complete plan. A website, a web design, you even hired the best developers for the purpose. You are stuck at the decision for an ecommerce solution – complete with shopping cart and payment gateway and all. Let’s help you with some advantages of Magento  – very popular amongst open source web developers. To begin with, let’s say it’s an open source e-commerce platform and is favored by most open source fans.

Here are some of the advantages of using Magento as a very apt e-commerce solution:

  • Single page layout to reduce bounce rate and ensure that customers complete the transaction.
  • Ability to manage more than one online shop with a single shopping cart software.
  • Secure Payment Gateway.
  • Content Management System for managing your online store.
  • Multiple language support.
  • Multiple currency support.
  • Different shipping rules varying from country to country.
  • Most importantly, it has in built SEO features.

Future Of E-commerce Application Development

Thursday, September 15th, 2011

Stores and offices are being completely taken over by the internet. All your daily necessities are just a click away. There are online stores for products which are delivered at your door steps and online businesses providing services to customers globally, with no barriers like time or distance! Whether it is a plane ticket or a brand new dress, you can get it at your door within a few clicks. So, if you ask the future of e-commerce application development and web development- looks bright so far!

Even if there is a company with offices round the world, they definitely have marketing strategies which include Internet Marketing; they have online portals for sales and services too! As a result the demand for web developers have increased many fold. E-commerce in itself is a very competitive market. E-commerce application development naturally has caught up and is now able to provide the users with customizations and innovative features to existing systems!

With such increasing demands in the field of e-commerce, web development in the field shall also flourish for a long time from now!

Oscommerce Development Features

Wednesday, September 14th, 2011

Looking for an out-of-the box online shop solution? Oscommerce provides you exactly with this – an all – in – one solution for your online business! Oscommerce is an open source platform for web development. This is a big advantage, because it can hence be customized in accordance to the requirements of different customers and different online businesses.

Oscommerce development has gained popularity due to its ability to be flexible and scalable. Written in PHP, Oscommerce provides a perfect platform for theme design and integration, payment gateways, and development of features and add – ons.

Here are some features:

  • Speed of installation
  • Built – in functionalities
  • SEO friendly
  • Payment gateway integration
  • Templates, Themes and skins – rich
  • Customizable for special widgets and buttons

 

Oscommerce is a readymade solution for online shop owners. However, it’s open source nature has always attracted attention of Oscommerce developers to make things better – for online business owners and their customers!

Reviews of Shopping Cart Software – Magento, OsCommerce and ZenCart

Thursday, May 19th, 2011

While building an online e-commerce website it is very necessary to build a high-quality and secure shopping cart system.

With so many shopping carts open source packages to choose from it gets hard to know which one to use for your website. Choosing the right one is an important factor in determining success of your e-commerce business. What features you need should be known while selecting your shopping cart.

Magento
It is one of the newer shopping carts but in some time it has attracted many people. The coding in Magento is totally based on latest PHP5 object oriented coding standards and the Zend framework. The good points of Magento are it is very much active in updating the code and fixing the errors or bugs; Capability of multi-storage and the default template is nice and attractive. There are certain problems too with Magento like it has a very complicated coding style which raises the budget for customization compared to other carts. Magento runs comparatively slow to other shopping carts.

OsCommerce
OsCommerce is the basis for both ZenCart and CRE [Chain Reaction Edition of OsCommerce] loaded and runs well. The advantages of this shopping cart are it has the most available number of contributions and modifications and its works well with MySQL and PHP5. But it can take a lot of time and money to install all the contributions [Add-ons] which you may want. It also doesn’t have graphic template system which means it is difficult to do modification of the design.

ZenCart
ZenCart has wide array of features which are based on OsCommerce though it is not possible to install add-ons directly from OsCommerce website onto ZenCart. Some good features in ZenCart includes product attributes managers, template system, html editor required for regular web page contents, ability to select the credit cards accepted, and many more. Other advantages with ZenCart are there is no licensing fees and many of the add-ons from OsCommerce are already installed. But to use them they must be first converted to ZenCart.

So these are the basic features of the most popular shopping cart software which may make your selection easier.

Secure E-commerce Transactions by Web Hosting Providers

Tuesday, May 10th, 2011

Online shopping is gaining its popularity on higher scale these days. Most people prefer to buy products and services online however; they don’t realize that the job of securing the online transactions they make is totally up to the web hosting provider who is responsible for utilizing the correct applications, security precautions and technological advancements just to ensure security of the financial details of the customers.

The three ways by which the web hosting providers secure e-commerce transactions are as follows:-

1] Advanced Data Encryption: This is the first way what web hosting provider for safe online transaction is advanced data encryption. Even a visitor wants to make a purchase; he is redirected to checkout page which is secured. All the information which a visitor submits on this page is completely scrambled before it is securely transmitted to the web server, where it is unscrambled and decoded using a key that is generated only once and is accessed by only the receiving server. The current standard for web page encryption is SSL [Secure Socket Layer].

2] Instant Suspicious Activity Notifications: Another method of providing safety is by providing instant notifications through e-mails or cell phone text. These notifications can be enabled within your control panel and whenever any distrustful activity occurs, they are sent automatically. By this you can keep a hacker or cyber criminal from stealing ownership of your domains or web hosting account.

3] Payment Processing Technology: This technology allows your customers to provide their credit or debit card or payment details to the third party online payment processor. They are financial institutions that collect and accept payments on behalf of website owners so that the financial details cannot be interrupted by anyone.

Strategies to be Successful in E-commerce

Monday, May 9th, 2011

The main objective of online business is to sell something, be it a product, a service or information. To achieve this, you need good web traffic on your website.

Some key strategies which should be considered to generate maximum traffic, customers and cash are:-

• Images should be used as your e-commerce website should reflect how you want customers to feel about your business.
• Promotional tools should be used for advertising your website.
• Add links to your web page. Links increase visitors who often tend to become customers.
• Another cost-effective strategy is starting with own affiliate program.
• Inclusion of articles, news or facts related to your eBusiness is very important.

While starting with online business, proper planning is very necessary. The strategic areas that have a large impact on the success of ecommerce business are:-

1] Define your Market – While starting with online business, it is very necessary to reach and connect with customers. So you need to define the target customers that is who are going to buy your products and the product positioning that is why they will buy your products.

2] Choosing your Ecommerce Platform – There are number of Ecommerce products to choose from the range. Selecting the one depends on various factors and functionalities you require. Three strategic considerations while choosing are Inventory Management, SEO and Cost.

3] Adding Content – Content is the most important part for any website. Content should explanatory enough to attract visitors to purchase your products, or services.

4] Selecting Payment Method – The payment method should give good flexibility to customers while making the payment for any product or service. Bad Payment Method may lead you to lose your customer.