E-Commerce - Shopping Cart
E-Commerce is a fancy term for all types of buying and selling online. The most common way to be involved in e-commerce is by using a "Shopping Cart Application" or "E-Commerce Store". (They are the same thing.) There are other ways to be involved in commerce over the internet, but this is the most prevalent.
Each shopping cart application is a bit different. We like to use Spiderweb Logic ECart that can be customized for all your needs. Our ECart is optimized by design for search engines. (That will help you attract more visitors.) See our Shopping Cart samples.
If you are an ASP.Net webmaster/coder and want to create your own website, I encourage you to review the PayPal integration template we have provided for your perusal. This should help jump-start your PayPal eCart development. This will be updated more over the next month.
We will be adding a template soon for Credit Cards (C#/ASP.Net) using Authorize.net.
Features of our standard Spiderweb Logic ECart
1) We designed our shopping cart to be very friendly for search engines. This is an essential ingredient to your overall success.
2) You can easily add, update, and delete products from your shopping cart website using a standard web browser. You can also choose which products to display on the home page with a simple click.
3) You can easily add and delete product categories and sub-categories. Products can be assigned to a couple different product categories, if you want.
4) You can create coupons for your visitors. These are great for postcard campaigns, newspaper ads, and for internet newsletters.
5) You can put products on sale - easily. Once the sale starts - the sale prices show up. Once you stop a sale, all the regular prices come back.
6) We are always adding new features. Automatic upgrades come with the normal package.
7) We will give you a customized shipping solution. You can have a fixed price shipping for all your products, or we can calculate shipping based on a simple rate sheet you provide, or we can have USPS or DHL automatically estimate your shipping rates based on the weight of your products. (FEDEX is in the works.)
11) We have some advanced SEO tools (and statistics programs) built into our shopping cart as well - including dynamic Google Sitemaps of your web pages, RSS feeds of your pages, and Google Analytics for analysis. The Google Sitemap and RSS feed can help Google and Yahoo respectively know of your new pages automatically. We even have special overrides to our default meta-tags if you desire configure these yourself.
We are always happy to add new features. If you want something we don't already have, we will give you a competitive quote to add that feature to your website.
Marketing your E-Commerce Store
Marketing your shopping cart is a significant part of the cost of maintenance, just as marketing is a significant cost of any sort of successiful business. There are a lot of skill and time needed to do this successifully for the Internet. Some of you may have the money to invest in hiring a professional. We do website marketing as part of our business, and are eager to put together a custom plan to meet your needs. A standard marketing package starts at $200 a month, with some additional fees for initial directory submission and keyword analysis. This is to maintain a regular link-building campaign for your website - particular to your keywords.
If you are interested, feel free to request a website marketing package from us.
However, if you are too broke with our current recession to consider this, I encourage you to schedule a block of time to learn the game. Here are some good resources:
