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So what elements should you consider added on your e-commerce website? If you’ve published a book before (not e-book, but if you want to go into that detail, see my article “Homemade Remedy for Download Theft”), most likely you’d already be familiar with the steps you need to take from the time you’ve conceived the story to the moment it’s out in the bookstore shelves. Yes, you would need an endorsement from celebrities, too! Remember Harvey Mackay’s “Swim With The Sharks Without Being Eaten Alive”? Well yeah, that one’s a classic.

Web copy, layout and other visuals, e-commerce elements, marketing elements, and customer service tools, are some of the basic stuff you need to incorporate in your e-commerce website. Each one of these elements come with its own set of structure that would also require a bit of search engine friendliness or better yet, full-blown SEO campaign.

THE WEB COPY
For your e-commerce website’s copy, consider the number of pages. Major search engines such as Google usually favor more webpages but be careful about using Javascript or adding frames. The simpler the structure of your text pages are, the better. Do not forget adding basics such as “About Us” or product description pages. When it comes to adding extra content such as blogs and RSS news feeds, the more optimized for the search engines (using keywords, backlinks, etc.) the better. You would also need the help of a flexible database so that each time you add new product or text elements, the storage can be extended. Administration area for uploading text content should be user-friendly.

IMAGES AND FLASH CLIPS
Images are important for your e-commerce website but be selective in handling them. Look into how they will improve your catalog or shopping cart before you assign your web designer into building elaborate Flash intro pages, logos, or banners for affiliate programs or other online marketing campaigns. Image incorporation can be expensive. Worse, they are not often crawled by Google’s spiders anyways. Also, the heavier the image files in your e-commerce website, the longer the loading time, the harder it is to retain customers who go by split second click-browse shopping method.

SHOPPING CART
Setting up the shopping cart itself requires the help of a good programmer but you can always make use of osCommerce. The important thing is that you are able to handle credit card payment processing with the aid of a low risk or a high risk merchant account provider. Your shopping cart has to be user-friendly enough to foster a good online shopping experience for your customers.

CUSTOMER SERVICE ADD-ONS
For a good discussion of customer service tools you need to add in your e-commerce website, see “7 Best Tools for First Rate Customer Service”. The key here is to provide interactivity measures for your customers to learn more of their buying tendencies, suggestions for improvement, inquiries, and above all, a way to reach them via mailing lists! Shouldn’t be complicated. When these foundations are built, you’re all set to sail in the gritty world of e-commerce industry.
Programmers India

Php Developers

The flexibility provided by the use of ASP .NET framework actually adds power to your online storefront. You can add unlimited products, categories and even customize the layout and design according to your convenience. Users can create several sub categories within the existing categories. These applications are so easy to use that users can themselves change the design and layout as many times as they want through a control panel. Shopping carts developed using the ASP.NET framework support database friendly languages like MS-ACCESS and MS-SQL.

ASP.NET based e-commerce solutions provide a user friendly interface and a secure check-out process.ASP.Net when used as a framework allow developers to provide functionalities like shipping rate calculation during real time. This is done by adding a smart ASP code snippet as a plug in into the check out page. Advanced ASP based software’s like Ace Flex allow users to sell both digital and physical products online. E-commerce solutions built on the .Net framework provide complete control to users enabling them to modify their shopping carts from any web browser anywhere in the world. While opting for shopping cart solutions you should go for those vendors who provide customized, scalable solutions at an economical cost. Ensure that your applications are developed and set up on dedicated application servers so that it can be easily managed from your hosting account.

ASP. NET based e commerce solutions have a very bright future. If you want to keep your costs further down then we suggest you go for vendors based in low cost locations like India. These vendors have the experience and expertise to develop innovative E-commerce solutions based on the ASP.NET platform and will provide you with good value for your money.
Building And Maintaining Static Ecommerce Websites Upon The Oscommerce Framework

Php Developers

For those of you who may be unfamiliar with OsCommerce, it is a FREE shopping cart solution built by many different programmers to be offered as “open-source”. It’s fine if a client really has a bare-bones budget because hey, it’s free. When we use a free solution such as OsCommerce, what we charge the client for is simply installing, customizing the template, and setting up initial categories, shipping, etc. Unless you are programming or installing many additional complex modules to interact with the base cart, I really can not fathom why a job using OsCommerce would cost $5000 or more. To me, this screams of shady business practices.

I’ve said this in a number of other articles, that I believe honesty is always the best policy. If you are using any sort of pre-developed software (whether it’s free or if you are paying for it), do not fool your client into believing that they are receiving 100% custom work. I find that even when using software, there are aspects that are custom (usually the design), but we make clear in our estimates and contracts which is which and what the client is actually paying for.

Designers and programmers are always on the look out for things that can help them while doing a job, everything from free scripts to stock photos to the latest software. As a designer or programmer, you have to judge for yourself what works best for you and what would benefit your client the most. I find the clients are much more comfortable working with you when they know exactly what you are doing for them and what they paying for and it’s simply more ethical to let a client know when you are using a free or pre-built solution.
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Codeigniter- Rapid Application Development

Processing via Google Checkout program permits you to sell the digital products and also integrate your campaigns of Google Adwords with your selling efforts, thereby assure more powerful ads. There are several options that are made available by Google Checkout to deliver the goods digitally for order. Access to the digital content and communicating instructions to access the digital content can all be determined by you. The delivery options for digital products made available by Google Checkout are:

Digital schedule - You can determine the time when the instructions will be received by the buyer to access the digital content that has been purchased by him/her. There are two schedules for delivery that has been determined by Google for the same:

- cents Pessimistic delivery - This is the default method that is employed by Google Checkout for processing orders. This delivery option takes place when the digital content that has been purchased by the buyer isn’t made available to him/her for access until their credit card are authorized for the payment amount of the order placed by them. There is generally a delay of a few seconds in the time when the order is confirmed by the buyer and the time when the buyer is given instructions to access the digital products purchased by him/her.

- cents Optimistic delivery - This method involves receiving of the instructions to access the digital products even when a valid authorization of the buyer’s credit card is not obtained by Google after 20 seconds. If you are looking forward to sell digital products via Google Checkout, it is advisable to use the optimistic delivery options only if it is possible to withdraw buyer’s access to digital content in case Google could not authorize the credit card of the customer.

Delivery method - You may also specify the method by which instructions to access the digital content will be provided to the buyer. There are primarily three methods that are employed by Google in this context:

- cents Email delivery - This involves sending instructions via email. This method should be used only if your orders are submitted to Google through HTML API or if you employ XML shopping carts for submission together with the base64-encoded cart and digital signature, which will be exhibited to buyer.

- cents Description-based delivery - This involves providing information to access the purchased digital content in Checkout API request.

- cents Key/URL delivery - This involves providing URL to the buyer where he/she can access the content or provides the key to unlock the digital content purchased by them.

However, most of merchants only need a simple system where they could just add their product, place payment buttons and customers would be able to pay them. Then the product would be delivered (if product is digital - instantly) and the order information would stay on merchant’s account. Google Checkout is not really well suited for digital product owners, since you have to do many configurations on your side and not everyone is familiar with that. However, there is a solution. Click2Sell.EU (http://www.click2sell.eu) is a merchant platform and affiliate marketing network that has completely integrated Google Checkout into order processing, so you can easily start selling your products - whether they are digital or material products - within few minutes. This way you can easily start profiting online without much trouble. Happy selling!
Php Developers

Oscommerce

The shopping cart market is flooded with hundreds of different shopping carts you can choose from. But before you start on your journey, looking at product demos and interviewing vendors, it is important that you understand the two categories of shopping cart solutions:

1) An off-the-shelf shopping cart solution. Offers little customization but can be integrated with any website very quickly. Examples include: PayPal, MonsterCommerce, Yahoo Stores, InstantEStore and 1ShoppingCart to name a few.

These solutions are cheap, battle-tested and very scalable. Disadvantages are - very little customization options, limited support and you don’t control the shopping experience.

2) Customized shopping cart based on a proven platform like XCart or OSCommerce. While typically more expensive to implement due to the time it takes to customize each platform, a customized shopping cart delivers full control to you as the merchant. You control the look and feel, shopping experience and any third-party plugins you wish to integrate.

Many large enterprises started with an off-the-shelf shopping cart and later switched to a customized shopping cart for a greater degree of control.

Disadvantages of going with a customized shopping cart are - Cost & time to implement (far more expensive), cost of maintenance, bugs introduced by your new code (it’s not going to be as battle tested) and limited support.

Since the platform people (XCart, OSCommerce etc) are in the business of developing their platform and not selling shopping carts, you typically get a third-party vendor to handle the customization.

–

Recommendations for picking a quality shopping cart:

1. Ask for references in the form of live websites using the shopping cart. Go to these websites and try to buy something as if you were a customer. Write down notes about your experience. Likes and dislikes.

2. Check the page.

3. Find out who are some of the biggest merchants using the shopping cart and what is their volume. Make sure the shopping cart can scale to meet your needs.

4. Customer Support - Your shopping cart will become integral to your business. Send an email to the company’s general support@ box and leave a vmail at the technical support box. Measure how long it takes to get a detailed (non canned) response.

5. Open architecture - If your needs change you might decide to switch to a different shopping cart in the future. Make sure the cart you’re picking now offers full export of the entire database of customers, orders, products etc. to make a possible future switch pain free.
Cakephp Developers For Hire

Php Developers

Oscommerce Developers

Selling Through Your Ecommerce Store

Running an online store can be easy and you don’t need to learn programming language to resell ebooks for free. In fact, many hosting provider offers easy-to-install web scripts from your control panel (such as cpanel) that allows you to set up your ebusiness almost instantly. There are a lot of popular ecommerce solutions, both free and paid. Among them, oscommerce is the most popular choice with a big base of end users. You can find help readily from the official site. You will also notice there are plenty of modifications available to download to further enhance your site. Check out to see if it is what you need. However, you may need assistant to install the script if you are new to PHP.

Running your estore allows you to sell your stuff at a low cost. In particular if you plan to sell a wide range of digital products such as ebooks, software and templates, eCommerce site will be an ideal option.

Online payment carts

If you are not programming-savvy, you may wish to use some online payment gateways to handle digital delivery. They provide a very secured delivery option with encryption technology, so that you don’t need to worry about unauthorized access to your digital download. These services usually charge you on a monthly basis, and depending on the number of products or amount of transactions, the charge will vary accordingly. Some services allow you to resell ebooks for free by offering trials or free membership, so you can test drive the payment merchant service before you invest in one.
Codeigniter-framework Supports Multiple Users

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Why? Because credit card processors and shipping services mutate all the time. Your cart will require updating. Which service works today may go out of business tomorrow, and leave you with the orders piling up.

Other important criteria are how easy it is to set up, and add products, and how easy it is for the customer to use.

When you set up your shop test it using a wide variety of the oldest and buggiest browsers you can find. If your web store works under them you’re home and dry.

Here are the cheapest, simplest, and most effective carts I’ve found:

1. Oscommerce (free) - http://www.oscommerce.com

A very good, full-featured, cart. Uses Php and MySQL. Not easy to set up for a ‘newbie’. Cookies are used to track the order. If you have PhpMyAdmin installed in your web account, it’s easier. Requires a customer to register before they can make a purchase. Supports a wide range of credit-card processors and shipping services.

Bad point: Technical support is limited to the Oscommerce forums, which are not helpful to newbies.

Also, it may be a while before an update is available to a payment module. These are done by unpaid enthusiasts.

Good point: Oscommerce is supported by thousands of unpaid enthusiasts; this means updates do eventually arrive, and it’s less likely to go out of business, unlike a commercial cart.

2. X-Cart (commercial) - http://www.x-cart.com

Similar to Oscommerce. Requires a customer to register before they can make a purchase. Lots of features and add-ons. Supports a wide range of credit-card processors and shipping services.
Has an affiliate program add-on, and lets others sell products though your cart.

3. Dansie Cart (commercial) - http://www.dansie.net

A well specified cart. Supports a wide range of credit-card processors and shipping services.

Bad point: Apparently the Perl code is obscured, to make it harder to copy, which is annoying if you want to customise it.

3. Interchange (free) - http://www.icdevgroup.org

A version of the old Akopia / Minivend carts. Complex product with lots of files and a lot of setting up to do. A complete solution, and includes the option of third party credit-card real-time order processing. Encrypts orders.

4. Agora (free) - http://www.agoracart.com

A Web-Store/Commerce.cgi hybrid.

5. The Commission Cart (commercial) - http://www.siteinteractive.com

A CGI-based shopping cart which also functions as an affiliate program. Other webmasters earn commissions by signing up and linking to your site.

6. ShopFactory (commercial) - http://www.shopfactory.Com

Has a nice little wizard-based set-up. If you have a lot of items in your shop, this is an option worth checking out.

This is a very valuable feature. A person who’s set up CGI scripts before will get the most out of this. Supports a wide range of credit-card processors and shipping services.

Bad points: It’s ugly, awkward, and uses JavaScript too much.

7. WebGenie Shopping Cart Pro (commercial) - http://www.webgenie.com

A simple, wizard-based option. Uses Javascript a bit, but the main work is done by CGI scripts. It saves the credit card information on your server.

It’s for someone who hasn’t set up a CGI script before. Expensive for what you get, but it works. Option to buy it on hire-purchase.

8. Actinic Catalog (commercial) - http://www.actinic.co.uk

Most suitable if you have lots of items in your store. It’s a ‘wizard’-based PC program; you type in your information, and the program sets up the store.

You should set up the default store as-is, then customise it later. Supports a wide range of credit-card processors and shipping services. A little complicated for an internet newbie; there’s quite a lot in it.

9. Order Maven (commercial) - http://www.briggsoft.com

A clever little program. It’s a standalone Windows executable, which the customer downloads. The customer starts it up, chooses the product, enters their details, and sends off their order like an email, with the credit card details encrypted. It costs $29.00 at the time of writing. No secure server or order page needed; it’s all done on the customer’s PC at their leisure.

You need to customise it. Make sure you write your mail server URL into the code. For the customer, the order module is a 160kb download.

NOTE: Try to avoid carts that use cookies and javascript only, or that tie you into only one secure server and credit-card processor.
Also avoid web-based services that you lease only. They can go out of business, leaving you flat.

Having read the above you should have eliminated quite a few programs from your shopping list. They either won’t work properly with all browsers, or they won’t encrypt your order, or they want to tie you into their manufacturers’ secure order system at $40+ per month.

Another option is to get a bespoke system set up for you by a specialist company. These cost thousands of dollars. Aren’t you glad you read this far?
Cake Php Dvelopment Process

Hiring Oscommerce Developers To Develop Oscommerce Modules

Community developed software provides a low cost alternative to traditional proprietary software. Merchants have the ability to customize community based products to meet their specific business requirement. When trying to select a shopping cart system, to run your online store, business owners must evaluate and assign value to the technical and operational specifications before deploying to production. Since one size does not fit all; merchants must choose the best product based on their unique requirements.

So how do you choose the best open source shopping cart software? First we’ll start by listing the major players in the small business market. In order to make my list the open source shopping cart must meet the 10 minimum requirements listed below.

Required Features:

1. Centrally controlled source code
2. An active developer community
3. Mature third party extensions (including PCI Compliant payment gateway extensions)
4. Support Linux and Microsoft Windows hosting environments
5. Software download must include all features listed on website (e.g. not crippleware or demoware)
6. Well written installation guide and user guide. Documentation may be available as a PDF document or as an HTML file.
7. Installs on a standard SSL certificate
8. Provides a custom notification email to the merchant and customer
9. Provides timely bug fixes and safe upgrade path
10. Installs in a dedicated and shared hosting environment

Now that we have our minimum requirements list we can begin to look at the top free shopping cart programs. In my opinion, the top free shopping carts for the small business market are:

- cents Magento Commerce
- cents VirtueMart
- cents osCommerce
- cents ZenCart
- cents CubeCart
- cents UberCart
- cents AbleCommerce

All of the free shopping carts listed above can be downloaded, installed and configured at no cost to the merchant. However, since most community based product installations come with a standard (non commercial quality) user interface most merchants will want to upgrade the GUI (graphical user interface). In order to upgrade the GUI and improve the end user experience merchants can choose to hire a web developer or simply purchase a custom template from sites like templatemonster. Template Monster (and others) provides thousands of affordable custom templates so merchants can easily deploy great looking online stores.

In order to ensure you’re selecting the best shopping cart for your business merchants should consider the following:

Capacity - The merchant must know and understand the product capacity limitation. For example, if you have a product catalog of 1000 products but the shopping cart has a 900 product limitation then that solution is not for you. Note: All of the open source products listed above have an unlimited product catalog.

Performance - If your ecommerce web store is slow customers will simply shop someplace else. Therefore, you must check performance with high user loads and with increased data loads. Both scenarios can bring a web store to its knees.

Community Support - Verify a strong development community exist. Review the online forums to see if the product has an active community of developers. Look for online questions then see how long it took for the user to get a response.

Technical Support - Ensure technical support is available via an active developer community or as a fee paid contract. There is nothing worse than having a production issue and waiting 5 days or more to get an answer.

Payment Gateway Support - In order to accept and process credit card payments the open source shopping cart must provide third party payment gateway extensions. The leading payment gateway services provide secure payment modules for many open source shopping cart programs.

Search Engine Friendly URL - Once you deploy your ecommerce web store you must submit your web store to the top search engines. In order to be indexed by the search engines your online store must have search engine friendly URLs.

Hire Oscommerce Developers

CRE Loaded is free, open-source software derived from osCommerce. What it did was it made use of osCommerce as its foundation and then utilized features that are way beyond osCommerce’s reach. Trying out CRE Loaded guarantees a win-win situation. You try it for free, and if you like it, there are paid and upgraded versions that you can always try after. On the other hand, if you are not satisfied, you won’t lose anything.

As a long time web designer I’ve dealt with any number of eCommerce options over the years. In general you’ve always had two major options:

1) You build and code from scratch. This required a great deal of knowledge in various coding languages in addition to the ability to design an attractive interface which will work within the construct of the website’s structure.

2) You pay a company with pre-built systems. This was not only extremely expensive but rarely allowed you freedom to create any sort of pleasing design as it would have to conform to their limited header/footer customization.

Well, I’ve seen the light now! The future is here and (unfortunately for people in “the business” like me) it’s unbelievably easy to do.

These free solutions are Open Source based online shop e-commerce solutions that are available under the GNU General Public License. They all contain a rich set of out-of-the-box online shopping cart functionalities that allows store owners to setup, run, and maintain their online stores with minimum effort and with no costs, fees, or limitations involved. Most of these Open Source solutions provide an e-commerce platform, which include the powerful PHP web scripting language and the fast MySQL database server. With no special requirements, they are able to run on any PHP 4.1+ enabled web server running on Linux, Solaris, BSD, Mac OS X, and Microsoft Windows environments.

Unbelievable right? Well,, it’s true and I’m loving it.

In addition to the obvious advantages of these open source stores, there are many less obvious benefits such as

- Active user forums where you can get answers to most any question without dealing with charges or “canned responses” from a profit company.

- The ability to change the design of your store nearly instantly by simply selecting a new “template” from within your administration panel

- Countless free “add-ons” and “modules” which add all types of additional features to your store.

- As the projects continue to grow and the stores improve you can upgrade, and of course the upgrades are free also.

In my opinion once of the greatest of the above features is the ability to change the design and/or appearance of your site with the ease of a few uploads and button clicks (ONCE YOU HAVE A DESIGN DEVELOPED). The most common complaint I found from OS users was the same one I’ve heard about other e-commerce packages. People weren’t aware of how much work would be involved in getting an original design put together. They would get to a certain point, hit an unexpected bottleneck, and be unable to keep going. The majority of the work involved in getting your store up and running was getting a design to function within the limits and restrictions of the store’s code. Every implementation will run into these problems, and everything takes longer and costs more than you plan for it, whether it’s proprietary or open source.

There are now; however, easy solutions for this issue which will prevent you from getting overwhelmed. Many businesses on the web who focus on web template development have entered a whole new era in template design. They have begun development of stunning designs for Open Source eCommerce solutions such as OScommerce, ZenCart, and CRE Loaded (the most popular of these Open Source eCommerce solutions). This allows you to easily implement a perfect store design within minutes. While these design templates are not free like the eCommerce solution, they are worth the mere $50 average price, saving you weeks of frustrating design.

You can find more information on these Open Source eCommerce Solutions at their hub sites. Just type in the OS solution name you wish to research into your search engine and their home pages will show up. The most popular solutions are ZenCart, OScommerce & CRE Loaded. But there are many other ones out there to choose from; however these three have proven themselves over time and have such large user bases and support groups that I would recommend trying one of them first before attempting to delve into lesser known solutions.

To sum this all up. While large companies will always need a custom built solution for their online stores, the average small business no longer needs to spend five or ten thousand dollars to have a quality store developed. The use of a free OS solution along with an inexpensive design template will have you selling online for pennies on the dollar compared with a custom built store. Even if you don’t feel you have the skill set to work with the OS solutions, you can hire any competent developer to implement it for you. Sure you’ll be charged, but the price will be a small percentage of what you would have paid.
Oscommerce Development

Php Developers