Part I – 5 Steps to Set up Your Shopping Cart

Part I – 5 Steps to Set up Your Shopping Cart

It seems like everyone has a website with a shopping cart, you’d like to have one as well. Where do you begin? It can be a daunting task to set up a shopping cart. This article presents the five steps you need to go through to a have the smooth installation.

Step 1 – Choosing the Shopping Cart

Begin by researching which shopping cart is provided by your hosting company. While using the shopping cart provided by the hosting company is the easiest route, keep in mind that this product serves a wide audience and may not do exactly what you would like it to do. For example, most canned shopping cart applications allow you to customize your storefront using templates; however, you may be limited to the photos or color choices defined within a particular template. Some shopping carts allow you to write custom cascading style sheets (CSS) code, but, CSS is limited to color and font choices only. On the plus side, the shopping cart provided by the hosting company will get you going much faster.

Going the custom route can be beneficial if you have particular needs that cannot be met with a canned application. Several options are available: open source, shareware and fully licensed products. To establish a custom shopping cart, you have to understand the scripting language to be used and have the ability to set up the shopping cart on the platform where your site is hosted.

When making a decision regarding which custom option to use, keep in mind the tech support available to you. With open source and shareware tools, you may have to wait for a while to get an answer to your question.

Step 2 – Set up your Merchant Account

This portion of the process takes the longest time – sometimes up to two or three weeks. Make sure that the merchant account that you set up works with the shopping cart you are selecting and can be hosted on the same platform as your website. The three major categories of merchant accounts that can be created are:

Standard Merchant Account – Using this account, you will be able to sell regular products, such as books, shoes or electronics.

Specialty Merchant Account – This account is created for merchants that sell computer software, flowers or training materials.

International Merchant – If you intend to sell your products internationally, then you will need this merchant account.

Your banker can arrange a meeting with a representative who will explain the fee structure and terms and conditions for setting up a merchant account.

Step 3 – Payment Gateway

Usually, when you set up a merchant account, your payment gateway will be set up automatically as well. In the case where the merchant account is not compatible with the shopping cart, you might have to set up the payment gateway manually. This process often involves a conference call between the payment gateway representative, the merchant account representative, and the technical person who is helping you program the shopping cart.

Step 4 – Set-up SSL

Once you set up your shopping cart, you need to add a secured socket layer (SSL) certificate to the portion of the site that houses the shopping cart. For example, you may place your shopping cart under the sub-domain as follows
shop.domainname.com

Most people won’t buy from your site unless you have the SSL installed. SSL prevents hackers from stealing your customers’ personal information, including credit card numbers. Typically, a SSL certificate is issued for a year and is location-specific, meaning you can’t move the certificate from one domain to another. Therefore, you should not to change the location of the shopping cart once you have applied the SSL certificate because you will have to purchase a new certificate for the new location.

Step 5 – Refund Policy, Privacy Policy, Terms and Conditions

Before bank representatives approve merchant accounts they often request that the site states your refund policy, privacy policy and terms and conditions. If you don’t offer a refund, this policy should be clearly stated on your site.

This article described the steps necessary for setting up a successful shopping cart installation. In Part II of this article, we’ll delve into the details of setting up the shopping cart to attract buyers and entice them to buy from you.

Resources

Visit http://www.cxtgroup.com/shopping-cart.html to see a graphical view of the steps involved and learn to learn about the shopping carts. If you would like to discuss your particular needs in setting up a shopping cart, call us today toll-free at 877-439-2539 for a FREE 1-hour consultation.

Resources Visit http://www.cxtgroup.com/shopping-cart.html to see a graphical view of the steps involved and learn to learn about the shopping carts. If you would like to discuss your particular needs in setting up a shopping cart, call us today toll-free at 877-439-2539 for a FREE 1-hour consultation.


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How to avail the most interesting ecommerce themes?

How to avail the most interesting ecommerce themes?

Integrating Ecommerce in its website has become so important for every business today if it wants to make sales.

Therefore, ecommerce themes provide users with an ample amount of flexibility because they can be installed. Many people use such themes to set their online stores. Many free ecommerce themes can be availed easily but some are available through purchase only. Ecommerce themes that are acquired from word press can be easily used to modify the content in the form of navigation buttons, images and text because they are prepared in content management systems. The widgets of the wordpress can be used to make all these changes. They are available in all sorts of sizes and shapes and can be used for modifying content in the form of footers, headers and sidebars of the Ecommerce website. Ecommerce themes in wordpress also allow users to add categories to the website along with tracking of customer orders.

Most of the wordpress users are quite confused about the fact that how the blog format of this software can be used for dynamic ecommerce based websites. However, it can be done quite easily with all kinds of features that are so much essential in any ecommerce-based website. Such features are shopping carts, product pages and the payment process of the website. Through word press ecommerce templates, users can easily create websites that can allow them to detect and organize all the customer orders placed on a website

Word press also has a support community, which can be consulted by people to resolve any technical issues that they are facing with the website. If the customers desire some additional functionality on the site, word press ecommerce extensions in the form of plug-in are available. Such plug-ins ensures that the users can work easily with standard word press themes also to create an ecommerce-based website.

It is so easy to use these themes because a large number of features can be added like the shopping carts by just working on the word press management console.

Such themes also have a large number of plug-ins in them as the shopping cart, which can be used for customers for adding products, making payments and their verification process. The customers can also remove commodities from their buying list of they have no plans to get them. Without shopping carts, it will not be easy to use online stores because making payments would become a very cumbersome process. Such themes can also be used to add payment processor through which you can get payments for the goods that have been acquired by customers.

Magneto is an open source platform that can be used to create ecommerce-based websites without wasting any time. Magneto based ecommerce themes are also available easily and changes can be introduced as it is a content management system. So, drive customers to your E-stores which have been created making use of these software. PSD to ecommerce websites can be easily developed through introduction of changes in the Photoshop documents.

Mr. Vikas is a Seo Expert providing Mibbos, a leading name in the arena of service providers providing Free Ecommerce Themes, Ecommerce Templates, Ecommerce Extensions and ecommerce store setup.


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Internet Payment Gateways

Internet Payment Gateways

Why use a payment gateway for your business?

In today’s digital age more and more businesses are creating an online presence. If you are a business that accepts credit cards online from customers, a payment gateway is an essential part of your day to day business. If you’re thinking of creating an online presence then understanding what a gateway does is essential.

A payment gateway creates a secure place for your customers to pay for merchandise. With the integration of a gateway and shopping cart to your web page you can accept payments for orders securely online, and without having to remember to batch out your terminal at the end of the day.

A gateway also offers benefits for the merchant using it. Many of today’s gateways offer a multitude of features that make running your business easier and less time consuming. If you’re building your website yourself you may not be entirely comfortable with the process of integrating a shopping cart to your gateway before adding it to your page. Many gateways are available with the shopping cart already added. All that’s required of the site builder is putting the html code into the site.

Gateways also offer features that a traditional terminal can not. Recurring billing is the most widely requested feature by merchants. Gateways allow you to enter the contract and billing information once, and then you’re done. You tell the system when to bill the card, and you’ll receive an e-mail telling you if the transaction was approved or not. You will no longer have to spend your valuable time with manually charging cards once a month, and there will be no forgetting to charge your customers.

Another benefit of the gateway is the ability to tie it into your QuickBooks program. If a gateway is set up with the QuickBooks plug in you’ll be able to easily import data from your gateway to QuickBooks, eliminating time consuming double entries.

Gateways offer real-time processing feedback, letting both you and your customer know immediately if the credit card being used was approved. It also allows a merchant to collect Level II data easily which will eliminate some of the costly downgrades that can occur when a merchant is a .

Beneficial to both the merchant and the customers, gateways offer added security and additional time for the business owner to focus on growth.

For this and other information about Internet Payment Gateways and electronic commerce please visit http://www.mymark.com/blog/jimanderson. Jim Anderson is the CEO of Electronic Commerce International, an ISO based in Las Vegas, NV. Please visit him at http://www.mymark.com/jimanderson to learn more about Jim and Electronic Commerce International.


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Payment Gateway Solutions: Technique of Online Payment

Payment Gateway Solutions: Technique of Online Payment

The increasing usage of World Wide Web provides an innovative and user-friendly approach to manage and organize businesses online. It helps to expand businesses globally and encouraged transactions from one part of the world to another, creating the requirement of secure payment gateway services.

A payment gateway is defined as a secure technique of online payment which permits all the online money transactions for any business activity. Customers can make online payments for products and services very easily and conveniently. Payment gateways solutions also offer extra services including money transfer, send and receive payments by emails; telephones etc. Customers can easily purchase products from any service provider situated anywhere in the world, without hesitation. This breaking of business barrier has increased the system of online payment gateways more acceptable and one of the most effective workable system.

This method of online money transactions provides a safe and practical way to manage the risks of ecommerce transactions.

This innovative system for moment transfer is entirely based on a person’s banking details. When the transactions are done online, banking details such as information about funds limit and credit card details of the customer’s account is required. So it is mandatory to identify the customer’s authorization and his or her information for secure and successful transaction.

Nowadays, credit cards are accepted in major for payment options in a payment gateway. There is no requirement of any software and technical knowledge for its proper usage. Only customer information is encrypted to make the payments secure and protected. The major issue while making payments online is to protect the fraudulent, unwanted spam and computer viruses because they may access the information of customer over the Internet. Payment gateway solution is a technique to detect and provide secure and effective payment solutions.

It acts as an effective platform between a business’ website and its customers. The main motive behind implementing this solution is to provide efficient payment gateways to facilitate customers to enjoy their buying experience.

The author of this article is a professional writer for Software Development India, an emerging IT company offering customized solutions including Payment Gateway Solutions and Web Site Graphic Design, search engine optimization and flash development India for clients around the world.

The author of this article is a professional writer for Software Development India, an emerging IT company offering customized solutions including Payment Gateway Solutions and Web Site Graphic Design, search engine optimization and flash development India for clients around the world.


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Your Shopping Cart Needs To Be SEO Optimized

Your Shopping Cart Needs To Be SEO Optimized

Given the level of competitions in commercial online businesses, you are well aware of the need to maximize the potential of your websites and other features that you might have. This includes optimizing your shopping cart by using SEO techniques to meet and go beyond the current web standards and enable you to get ahead of your competitors.

An online shopping cart is in itself a wise investment especially if you have a website geared towards commercial viability. The benefits of a shopping cart cannot be undermined. By having a shopping cart, you can manage more efficiently your product inventories. It is also a great means to convert website traffic to tangible sales. The shopping cart is useful application that can help increase your visibility on the internet which in turn can increase your return of investments.

The shopping cart is an innovative product that you should take full advantage of. And like any other investment, if you don’t take good care of your cart, it will not be worth anything. There are a number of ways where you can optimize your shopping cart.

When you customize your shopping cart remember to that little crawling neighborhood friend of yours: the spider. But in this case it’s more of the web spider concept that you need to worry about. It is important that your links on your shopping cart can be spidered. Ensure that your URLs will be easily remembered by both your clients and search engines. Using categories and product names on the URL is one way to keep search engines spidering your content.

One thing that you should avoid when optimizing your shopping cart are duplicate contents. You can have duplicate contents when you the same exact content in multiple categories. Your page rank can be affected by having duplicate contents.

Another thing that you should remember is to know your clients’ needs and how they go about finding them. When you created your shopping cart, use commonly searchable words to refer to your products. For instance, use “chair” if you’re selling a chair and not a “comfort device”. Make sure to use brand and specific model names on your inventory as well. Place them properly in the title and heading of the pages.

With regards to the SEO order, use proper title tags. Write creative meta descriptions as well as the texts describing the products and categories. Don’t forget to use proper headings.

Another aspect of SEO that you should incorporate in your shopping cart is linkbuilding. This is creating an opportunity for search engines to find and rank you. You will have to create a lot of links to your site. You can email various site owners and sell the idea of linking your site. It would be ideal to have site owners use your top keywords in the anchor text, though.

If you find SEO work complicated and troublesome, there are numerous specialists which can do the work for you. However, that would be additional costs on your end. It would be better to study the techniques and applications and do the basic optimization yourself.

In this day and age, being noticed on the internet is no longer as simple as creating your own website. You need to direct traffic to your webpages including your shopping cart and try to convert that web traffic into sales. The need to optimize your shopping cart is real and would be advantageous to you as well.

While many shopping carts now a days come with 2 or 3 of the components listed above. It’s difficult to find one which acommodates ALL SEO optimization  components, but there is one that comes to mind — Pinacle Cart.

Their current version is highly adaptable to all SEO tactics out there, including SEO friendly URL’s, proper .htaccess handling and mod rewrite syntaxes making Pinacle Cart a true winner in the Bang For Your Buck category. Plus, Pinacle Cart is one of the few companies which truly do want to help you succeed. Their support is truly amazing in every aspect and your feedback is always welcomed an tended to.

For more details and pricing on Pinacle Cart, be sure to check out their website over at http://pinaclecart.com when you have a minute. I have to tell you, they are not cheap, but (a) they are no more expensive than any other high quality shopping cart, but pound for pound, they are certainly worth EVERY penny.

Joey J, aka Mad Hat Marketer, has been successfully teaching offline businesses for over a decade and has recently transformed his business and entered the online industry to share his accolades of knowledge with online marketers and is currently finishing up his 4th online marketing study course.


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Problems to Expect When Setting up an Online Store

Problems to Expect When Setting up an Online Store

Whether you’re using the most advanced store builder or you’re getting your online shop customized by a designer, do expect that you will come across several problems before you are able to fully get into the swing of eCommerce.

While you don’t exactly need to be a computer whiz to be able to launch your online store, you will need some technical knowledge. Today’s store builder software are pretty straightforward and easy to learn. But do anticipate that technical problems will be the first among a line of issues you might encounter.

Display problems are among the most common of these technical blunders. Make sure you run your online shop in different browsers – choose among the most popular: Mozilla Firefox, Google Chrome, Internet Explorer, Opera and more. Check on the size of the online store in these browsers and do a quick check on functionalities by clicking through your links.

The next issue you have to contend with is that of marketing. You may have built a super online store that literally has everything anyone can ever need, but without an audience or a set of users to appreciate this, it is all in vain. With that, it is important to work with basic keyword research and search engine optimization. You should also try to get relevant links to your online shop. For search engines like Google, Yahoo! and Bing, each relevant link to your online store acts like a vote. The more of these links you get, the better your ranking, the more visitors you will get. Consider also paid marketing to get more targeted visitors that have a higher potential to convert. This is the ideal marketing scenario for you if you have the budget for it.

Another potential problem is supplier reliability. Once you actually start getting orders for the products you are selling, this is the time you will be able to test if you’ve chosen the right supplier to work with. To avoid hassles, we recommend ordering products from the said supplier for yourself first. This will show you how fast their response time is as well as any customer support they may be able to offer. Dropshipping is also a great alternative supply chain management technique for your online store . Here, the supplier sends the products directly to your end-consumer. Since everything is done in the web environment, it would be easy to replace your supplier should something go wrong.

Those are just some of the problems you can expect when setting up and running your own online shop.

<a rel=”nofollow” onclick=”javascript:_gaq.push(['_trackPageview', '/outgoing/article_exit_link']);” href=”http://www.shopster.com” title=”build online store”>Shopster</a> offers a complete ecommerce solution that allows dropshippers, suppliers, and retailers to <a rel=”nofollow” onclick=”javascript:_gaq.push(['_trackPageview', '/outgoing/article_exit_link']);” href=”http://www.shopster.com” title=”selling online”>sell online successfully</a>.


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Why Small Retail Businesses Need An Online Store

Why Small Retail Businesses Need An Online Store

Unless the internet up and vanishes, E-commerce is here to stay in Canada and the world. The reasons why an online presence is vital to your existence as a retail business is simple.

Canadians are shopping online. Proof: Statistics Canada estimated that Canadians used the Internet in 2009 to place orders for goods and services valued at .1 billion, up from .8 billion in 2007. The increase resulted from more online shoppers and a higher volume of orders. In 2009, about 39% of Canadians aged 16 and over used the Internet to place more than 95 million orders. This was up from 32% and the 70 million orders placed in 2007, when the survey was last conducted.

Bigger retail stores buy their products online. So if you are a smaller business hoping to get your products into a bigger store, you need an online presence. Nowadays, you cannot walk into a store to showcase your product to the manager without them asking you for the web address of your online store.

The Benefits of E-Commerce To Your Business:

You can sell to more customers. You do not necessarily have to shut your doors to the walk-in customers, but by having an online store you can begin to reach out to potential customers that do not even live in the same zip code.

You can sell more types of products. E-commerce allows you to sell digital products and physical products. So if you are already selling physical goods, you may decide to branch out and begin selling an e-book or MP3s or digital instruction manuals.

The opportunity for expansion is unlimited. The number of people buying on the internet is growing every year quickly and without an online store you are missing out on a huge sectore of consumers.

Your competition has an online store. The fact is that if you want your business to stay alive, you need to stay competitive.

It is easier to get started than you think. Many business owners are simply scared of technology and believe that they cannot learn to use it. In the early days of the internet, you had to be a computer whiz to have your own online store, but nowadays shopping cart software is simple to install and simple to use.

It is inexpensive to get started. You can buy online store software that will have all the functions you need for around 50$ .

Heidi Rasmussen, from iDevSpot offers reasonably priced and easy to use shopping cart software.


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