ECommerce | Utopian Web Strategy

Home » Blog » Archives for eCommerce

Posts Tagged ‘eCommerce’

Benefits of Magento E-commerce Services

Benefits of Magento E-commerce Services

In this cut-throat competition of the online market, everyone is seeking out for one or the other platform for a successful business venture. The market is flooded with several software and applications that offer one of the best possible services and ways to be able to manage your business well in the software arena.

And, in this aspect, Magento has come up as an open source platform, which provide the best and the most efficient ways to deal with the e-commerce issues. Here are some of the important and the mandatory issues that a platform should avail while coming up with an e-commerce venture, and Magento has never failed to satsfy its customers, they are as follows—

With the use of Magento as an e-commerce platform, traffic is the most crucial issue that gets resolved. Magento provides you with the facility that the search engine is able to view the content more easily and hence, it improves the search engine ranking. The improved and the better ranking is forced to attract traffic to your site, which in return increases the chances of the conversion rates.

The capabitity of the Magento service that it provides an extesive service of the feedback and testimonials, that becomes an excellent source of publicity. Since, Magento is an open source software, it allows a transparent service so that even the client is able to get a fair idea of how it works, and some knowledge so that he/she can work upon it later as per the needs and the requirements.

It offers the best possible shopping experience to the customers and this has been possible because of the efficient and the most extensive shoping cart, easy check out options, and moreover, a very user-friendly experience. It has a group of large community users, so it offers the wide scope of continuous advancement and development, keeping in mind the suggestions and the problems of the different customers as well as the users.

There is no doubt to the fact that we have intensionally tried not to cover the technical benefits of the Magento service keeping in mind the fact that it is one of the best and the easiest available options when it comes to the hosting, development, and even customization and maintenance. However, it also depends on the web designing and the development company that you choose for setting up a Magento based e-commerce venture because they avail you with the best possible services.

Aug 20th, 10 | Magento | Comments (0)

Top 5 Powerful E-commerce Plugins For Wordpress

Top 5 Powerful E-commerce Plugins For Wordpress

Today I’m exploring the top 5 e-commerce or shopping cart plugins for Wordpress. Yesterday I wrote a topic about Using A Blog Vs. Using A E-commerce Website, and this article continues from there listing the commercially viable e-commerce plugins to use if you are considering selling products or services to your readers.

eShop
The eShop plugin allows you to open your own store right from your blog. You can sell anything from eBooks, software to even PLR product with this plugin. At the moment it only utilises the Paypal payment system to receive money and is also compatible with Wordpress 2.7+. Visit the plugins homepage to get a more detailed description of the shop’s features.

Shopp
The Shopp plugin is a featured filled online shopping cart for your blog. It’s been designed to make it easy for just about anyone to setup online store in minutes while giving users the ability to easily customise every aspect of the shopping experience. This particular plugin does cost money and for a single license it is US or for a developer’s license it will cost 9US. The difference between them is how many times will you be using this plugin on different blogs? If you’re a business setting up ecommerce sites for clients then the developer license will be worth the cost. Also Shopp offers different payment options, such as Authorize.Net, eWay Payment, HSBC ePayments and PayPal Pro which will each cost an additional .00.

WP e-Commerce
The WP e-Commerce plugin is a state-of-the-art e-Commerce platform with a focus on aesthetics, web standards and usability. This seems to be the free e-commerce plugin that is most commonly downloaded by users from around the word. It does offer many features and lots of options for users.
Download WP e-Commerce
WP e-Commerce Features

WP Live-Shopping
The WP Live Shopping plugin is a widget that enables you to display all relevant live shopping offers within your Wordpress blog. You can add the widget to your sidebar and customise its appearance within the Live Shopping option panel. You will also need to have a Live account setup in order use this plugin.
Download WP Live-Shopping
Visit WP-Live Shopping Homepage
YAK Shopping Cart

YAK is a simple shopping cart plugin for WordPress. How it works is it associates products with blog posts, where the post ID also becomes the product code. There is an options screen in the admin section that allows you to configure settings for the shopping cart and had 3 additional pages for showing and fulfilling orders, for product management, and basic sales reports.

Aug 19th, 10 | WordPress | Comments (0)

WP e-Commerce Review For Wordpress

WP e-Commerce Review For Wordpress - Part I

WP e-Commerce plugin for Wordpress seems to be one of the most commonly used (currently 175,000+ downloads) shopping cart system across the board. I’ve been testing the latest version 3.6.10 and it has a lot of additional features compared to review on eShop I wrote recently.

The WP e-Commerce Wordpress Plugin was developed by a New Zealand company called Instinct. Since this company has dedicated funds and resources to this plugin, I presumed they would want to make money from selling this plugin. Lucky for us, they didn’t and have been giving away this plugin for free. Though, the first thing you will see on the front page of their website is the following:

Home of the famous WordPress e-Commerce Plugin

The WordPress e-Commerce plugin is a state-of-the-art e-Commerce platform with a focus on aesthetics, web standards and usability. It is both free and priceless at the same time.

Now, being the state of the art e-commerce plugin is a bold statement and I have tested out numerous e-commerce software that I will be comparing this too. Let me review this plugin to test if their statement is true.

THE PROS
Easy Installation

It took me less than 5 minutes to upload and install without any errors or conflict with other plugins so far. I could easily find the newly created section in Wordpress administration called e-Commerce. It contained Sales, Products, Groups, Variation, Marketing and Settings links making it very easy to find what you need. I am glad they did this and made it simple.

Well Defined Categories / Groups Section

There is a self-explanatory tab that says Groups which allows you to add unlimited categories and subcategories to your shop. It’s very standard to see this available in e-commerce systems and it’s great to see this part of WP e-Commerce plugin. In comparison to other Wordpress shopping cart plugins they utilise pages to separate categories and it becomes a total nightmare without proper documentation.

Adding Products Is Easy

Adding products is easy when you click on the Products link. It offers a wide range of settings to customise your products including price and stock controls, shipping and weight settings, product variations, merchant notes, product downloads, coupon codes and promotions. These are very important when you have different products to sell and helps you distinguish between A and B product.

Widgets make customisation a breeze

What I’ve found quite handy are the customisable widgets that you can install on your sidebar as part of this plugin. A common widget people have on their website is the shopping cart. Having this displayed allows a customer to see what they have currently selected, then head to the checkout section to pay for all their items. The new widgets you’ll see in this plugin are: Shopping Cart, Groups, Categories, Price Range, Product Specials, Latest Products, Price Range and Donations. You can select anyone of those to display on Wordpress at any time.

Profit Using Marketing And Cross Promotion Tools Provided

Under the Marketing link it allows you to offer coupon codes for any product in your range. It’s a great way to encourage your customers to shop with the coupon code to follow through with a purchase. It’s a definite plus for me to have this tool built into the system. Some additional options you can switch on are:

• Cross Sales within your shop
• Show Share This (Social Bookmarks)
•How Customer Found Us Survey option

Many Payment Gateways Available and SSL Connection Included

WP e-Commerce comes with a few pre-installed payment gateways including Chronopay, PayPal, PayPal - Express, Google Checkout, and manual payment (for cash or money orders). If you want other payment gateways they offer such as Authorize.net or eWay, then you will have to purchase the Gold Cart Module. Also all transactions are processed securely through an SSL connection if you have SSL installed on your server.

Aug 18th, 10 | WordPress | Comments (0)

Magneto Development: Making e-commerce Easy!

Magneto Development: Making e-commerce Easy!

When it comes to developing the modern commerce solutions in coherence with the newest technologies and ever-evolving retail world – Magneto application development perceptibly comes forth as the foremost choice. It works as an effective platform and allows the users to set up a quick and feasible online retail store. Over the years, magneto has been deeply scrutinized and thoroughly mastered by the experts, who can easily merge this superb platform with other shipping modules and offer the great and long-lasting solutions to companies. As per your needs, you can also get the customized Magneto solutions. Though there are other platforms available in the market, when it comes to reliability and feasibility – no one can match up with the efficiency of this compatible platform.

Actually, it is an e-commerce portal development service, which has been constantly improved with the help of the latest tools and technology to stay ahead on course and meet up the modern e-commerce challenges. Magneto programming is the foundation of this platform, which is considered as the most user-friendly platform and offer diverse yet effective solutions. With the help of Magneto, you can easily set up an online retail store within a stipulated time period. In fact, developers can further customize this platform, as per your demands and requirements. Throughout the world, Magneto has become synonym with online retail solutions. It has been regularly upgraded with the help of the new features and web tools.

Over the years, Magneto web development has evolved a lot and become the fasted growing open source e commerce platform. Now that more and more users rely upon the Internet to buy all sorts of products, Magneto has been making lives of lot many people around comfortable in one way or another. It comes with a secure coding platform, offers multi-store functionality with space for unlimited products and services to be listed.

Magento is also search engine friendly coding architecture platform. To know more about this superb platform or make use of the latest code release, you can take help of several active Magento forums and list of professionals working for the betterment of this technology.

If you want to have your own Magneto platform to help you sell your products and services in a rewarding way, then it is better to contact the leading Magneto development firms. The professionals can guide you better and help you avail the various benefits that one associates with Magento.

Jun 29th, 10 | Magento | Comments (0)

Drupal Ecommerce Websites: Open Modules, Open Success

Drupal Ecommerce Websites: Open Modules, Open Success

It’s certain! You cannot survive highly competitive business environment if your website cannot survive on the web. If you are into e-commerce, then having a website with cutting edge content is a matter of online existence for you.

However, there are hoard of websites that are like a herds of sheep. One odd trendsetter leads and others follow. The time has come that demands to make one’s website different from the other. The responsibility lies on the shoulders of the e-commerce website designer to create something unique every time. Web content of e-commerce websites is also going to play the most crucial role as the whole gamut revolves around the contents.

The search engines are scanning the content to rate the relevancy of the keywords. Keywords are going to live by their names and that makes the task of a web designer more challenging than ever.

Thankfully, Drupal e-commerce modules are a promising happening. Drupal is open source software for content management. It supports websites of all genres ranging from individual to entrepreneurs. Most content management systems can work on Drupal Core, a very basic version.

This version provides for some fundamental facilities like search, caching, multilevel menu, RSS feed, etc. But these plain vanilla versions are not going to add flavor for an e-commerce website designer. E-commerce website designer needs an extra embellishment that will exactly serve the purpose. As on 1st August 09, the Drupal website had over 4600 modules written and contributed by the Drupal community. Content Construction Kit, Views and Panels were some of the most dominant modules contributed by the communities.

Drupal & ecommerce: profitability combined

Ecommerce websites designed using Drupal are able to manage virtual economies. E-commerce website designers can embed features like invoice generation, sales summaries, subscriptions, taxes and shopping carts. It allows e-commerce transaction through the likes of PayPal and eWay.

Other than these features, some characteristics of Drupal make it the best of the lot. These include:

Search engine friendliness: your site can certainly get Google friendly with contributed modules like smart .ht-access and RL optimization.
E-commerce website designers can write secure codes and make their site as secure as required for e-commerce.
Drupal caters for specific content requirements of an e-commerce sites.

Drupal modules for e-commerce.

Affiliate Drupal Shop: This module allows affiliate marketing of products on Drupal websites. This module lacks updates and does not rank very high on users’ charts.
Adyen - uber-cart payment: this module is capable of integrating payments through various sources like cash cards, bank transfers and even mobile phones.
Amazon store: Amazon Product Advertising came up with this module. It allows instant installation and usage of Amazon Associate Stores.

Finally, an open source free content management system like Drupal is only paving way for future technologies that will change the face and formulas of the way we shop. E-commerce website designers must equip themselves to get in line with this cutting edge technology that is only going to make our world much easier.

Jun 28th, 10 | Drupal | Comments (0)

Benefits of Using Magento Ecommerce

Benefits of Using Magento Ecommerce

Your online business deserves only the best. Because you put great effort into the venture, you need to get only the best for it. Several programs exist in the Internet for organizing your site as well as offer you ways to manage your IT infrastructure. However, not all of them provide you with efficient ways to deal with the most common issues you are facing. If you want to get your product or service to the next level, getting an ecommerce hosting, like that of Magento, is the answer. If you wonder why successful entrepreneurs choose it, here are the benefits you can enjoy.

Better Traffic Generation

Traffic is crucial for your online business. If you attract more traffic to your site, the chances of conversion rates are bigger. With more guests guided to your products or service, you can increase your sales. By subscribing to affordable ecommerce hosting, you can take advantage of better search engine optimization. The platform allows the search engines to view more of the contents of your website. As a result, your web takes the top ranks and attracts more free traffic.

Better Advertising

Ecommerce hosting companies featuring the Magento platform allow you to take advantage of your customers’ opinion. Because your customers’ feedback and testimonials are your biggest attraction to potential clients, the hosting servers help you bring them where they should be, at your product level. The power of word-of-mouth advertisement is a free yet efficient way to market your product.

Open Source Platforms

One attraction of ecommerce hosting is the open source system it offers. Ecommerce hosting company provides a transparent operation for the public to see. It allows its clients to understand how the software works. With clear hosting plans, clients acquire more knowledge about the system, thus allowing them to fix and add new features as the case may require them.

Customers’ Satisfaction
Customers’ satisfaction should be the utmost priority in ecommerce hosting. Because the life of your business depends on your customers, you have to give them the most pleasurable shopping experience possible. By providing efficient shopping carts, comprehensive search and easy checkout functions, you can assure your clients of a user-friendly site. Magento ecommerce accepts a wide variety of payments and international currencies, helping your clients abroad to purchase with ease.

Continued Advancements
The ecommerce hosting utilizing Magento has a commitment for continued advancement. The hosting server accepts report of problems and suggestions from the community. They use all the feedbacks to improve their operation. The open system of the platform allows you to upgrade the services easily.

The foundation of ecommerce hosting is excellence. By providing their clients with a reliable platform, you have the assurance of the best and most affordable ecommerce hosting possible. When you subscribe for it, you provide your business with better options to improve your management as well as a friendly environment for customers. With an excellent system, you can increase your visitors and thus, increase your sales. The money you put in it is worth the enormous return of investment.

Jun 27th, 10 | Magento | Comments (0)

Inside Magento: Open-Source eCommerce

Inside Magento: Open-Source eCommerce

In under a year’s time, Magento, an open-source eCommerce platform, has become the top-searched eCommerce system online, overtaking popular platforms such as osCommerce and Zen Cart. Not only has Magento impressed business owners, but developers are singing its praises as well. But what’s so great about Magento, and how did it push aside its competitors so quickly? We at The Website Owner’s Manual are here to give you the scoop on Magento, and will help you decide if this popular eCommerce platform is right for your business or development undertaking.

For Businesses

Magento is open-source, so it’s FREE to download (individual support comes at a price, but the online support forum is free to use)! The search engine optimization (SEO) features are top-of-the-line in comparison to other platforms. For example, Magneto allows merchants to create their own URLs for products on the administrator control panel. Most platforms create a product URL upon creation, which are often times unreadable for the search engines. Google Analytics, a free tool that allows in-depth tracking of website statistics, comes integrated with the download. Multiple stores can be maintained across different domains using only one Magento installation. The capability to zoom-in on product images is included. Rates for USPS, FedEx, and UPS are integrated at real time, so shipping and handling quotes are always up-to-date. Customers can compare products side-by-side. There is a one-page checkout system, so customers are only a click away from ordering products.

Jun 25th, 10 | Magento | Comments (0)

Magento Web Development: Making Ecommerce More Viable

Magento Web Development: Making Ecommerce More Viable

Right from the very beginning ecommerce started off as a hugely popular marketing concept. In the beginning, there were limited numbers of players but now with everyone turning to the Internet to search and buy products, almost all types of products from supplements and drugs, clothing and jewelries to kitchenware and commercial equipments are found on the shelves of many online stores. And in the coming days, ecommerce is bound to endorse more products and expand its customer base.

All these developments augur well for the sellers as well as the buyers. Moreover, there is one industry which is silently reaping the benefits of ecommerce popularity. The web application development industry is currently not only enjoying a boom but is more than happy to come up with new and improved web applications which are designed to make ecommerce more viable. And magento application development is a big step in this direction.

Magento is an open source platform for ecommerce development. It is in fact a complete package which is designed to make setting up an online store quick and simple task. This solution comes with so many inbuilt features that you can install to run your online store instantly. It has basic features and functionalities of an ecommerce website such as shopping cart, catalog management and a search engine for searching products. New features can also be added to your site with magento programming so that its usability is maximized both from buyers as well as sellers’ point of view. Moreover, the inbuilt features of magento can also be modified or customized as per the likings of the ecommerce site owners. Different themes for your website can also be designed with magento. As such, the things that you can do with this open source solution are many.

| Magento | Comments (0)

Magento - Best Choice for Ecommerce Solution

Magento - Best Choice for Ecommerce Solution

In today’s technology-driven times, ecommerce solutions serve businesses worldwide. This includes the design and development of an entire ecommerce Web site along with a database of products, product information and product search, order processing and payment system integration, etc. Our experience with Web development allows us to tailor each solution exactly to our customer’s individual business requirements.

Ecommerce is becoming a highly developed business all the time. And for running your online stores more powerfully Magento Development can be the solution.The main aim at Magento was to develop a platform that will give the entire control in the hands of online merchants once again. With Magento eCommerce, there are bound to be no constraints on business processes and flow.

Magento is a feature-rich, professional open-source eCommerce solution that offers merchants complete flexibility and control over the look, content, and functionality of their online store. Magneto’s intuitive administration interface contains powerful marketing, search engine optimization and catalog-management tools to give merchants the power to create sites that are tailored to their unique business needs. Designed to be completely scalable and backed by an extensive support network, Magento offers companies the ultimate eCommerce solution.

Due to remarkable benefits it offers, Magento ecommerce development has become quite popular in today ecommerce market. Thousands of online shopping cart website owners use Magento as a platform for their successful running online stores. One of the very important factors for its popularity is its Eye catching and attractive User friendly Designs making it an enjoyable experience for every visitors on your website and thereby increasing the ROI Magento shopping cart is one of latest in market with advance features of open source shopping cart that it helps you to build Not only a great shopping cart website in very short time but comes with many extra-ordinary functionality.

This Open Source eCommerce software is very powerful and includes many features that have not been seen in Open Source products before. Magento eCommerce is one of the fastest growing new software, and looks set to become a dominant force in the eCommerce industry.

Jun 24th, 10 | Magento | Comments (0)

Magento: The Next Generation Of E-Commerce Platforms

Magento: The Next Generation Of E-Commerce Platforms

When it comes to FREE open source e-commerce solutions, OS-Commerce and Zen-Cart are the first names that come to mind. They were and still are the standard for shopping carts and online stores. But like everything else, things change and evolve over time. And one software almost nobody ever mentions is rising up to become the new standard for the next generation of e-commerce platforms - Magento.

At first glance there doesn’t seem to be a big difference between Magento and Zen-Cart. They are both FREE to download and use, they are highly functional, integrated, and customizable solutions. Both have sophisticated shopping carts, product catalogues, and pricing features. Both support multiple languages and currencies, secure payment gateway options, and newsletter marketing campaigns. So why choose a new software if Zen-Cart has been around for so long and made so many people happy?

Well, the truth is that Zen-Cart has not undergone a major change in recent years to make it user-friendlier and to modernize the interface. So other programmers have jumped in and created a similar software but with better features and more modern interface. Magento was designed to be much more intuitive when it comes to setting up your products and prices, etc. It allows for easy bulk upload of your products, something you have to do manually in Zen-Cart (or find a working plugin). That becomes a vital time saver when you have more than 20 products or are creating lots of new products each month. The Zen-Cart interface was designed to be highly functional, but you really gotta be careful what you are doing and without programming skills you’re almost doomed. Magento not only looks more modern, but the user interface is also much more user-friendly and easier to use.

There are other subtle differences that make Magento stand out from the crowd. First, you have more options in customizing your product search categories. Very important if you want to make it easy for people to find what they are looking for fast. Second, if you have a small business and need to integrate your data with say QuickBooks or your ERP Software, Magento will allow you to do that. Next, Magento’s one-page checkout beats Zen-Cart’s 3-page checkout any day. Finally, Magento has a built-in CMS (Content Management System) that lets you customize your static pages with ease. Sure, Zen-Cart has the “EZ Pages”, which are nice but you still have to put HTML code in there. With Magento you have a bult-in editor that allows you to style your page without having to write HTML code. All in all, it just seems like Magento is more up-to-date and uses technologically advanced features.

There are of cause downsides to it. Magento, being a relatively new software on the market, doesn’t have as many extensions and plugins as Zen-Cart has. To customize the software to your liking you might have to hire a programmer or web developer. Zen-Cart’s Banner Manager makes it easier for you to track your advertising campaigns on your site, and there is no current lightbox feature included in Magento, if you’re a big fan of lightboxes you should use Zen-Cart. But then you are probably a web designer and know what you are doing. Magento was designed for people who have little HTML or php knowledge, which of cause doesn’t mean web designers shouldn’t use it

Whether or not Magento will become the new standard for Online Stores remains to be seen. I have been in the web design business for over 5 years and have seen many new things come and go. And one thing is certain; Magento gets me excited and motivated! These guys have taken steps into the right direction and with more people catching on (spread the word!) and developing open source extensions for this software I have no doubt it will ultimately succeed. If nothing else it’s good to see that some people still believe in a good cause and allow you to use their product for FREE. Just think how many hours or painstakingly programming, troubleshooting and testing they have put into this software, just so you don’t have to spend hundreds of dollars elsewhere. Isn’t that nice?! Be thankful!

| Magento | Comments (0)

Get Your FREE No Obligation Quote

Please enter your contact details, it takes less than 30 seconds!

Insight and Strategy for Online Success