Steps to Choose a Solution for Ecommerce Website

Choose an ecommerce solution, what technologies are available for creation of e-commerce sites are the questions that trigger in your mind in the initial phase of an ecommerce website development. For an online merchant, technology is indeed a first strategic choice that will affect in many ways like to accelerate the development of online activities, it may increase or decrease the future costs, etc.

You may come across many articles on ecommerce regarding this but it will be very interesting to read the two simple steps to choose an ecommerce solution,

1. Choosing a programming language:

Just do some research through search engines to find the programming languages to develop an ecommerce website, You will get a hundreds of results to choose the technology, but only two of them covers 95% of market, the PHP and asp.Net. These two languages are the excellent in all cases that they produce high-quality ecommerce websites. The main difference is the cost incurred by each technology.

ASP.Net Ecommerce:

It is the product of Microsoft. It requires purchasing a license to use this language. Moreover, the website must be hosted on a server, which is compatible to .net framework. For small business merchants, it is hard to afford the cost of using this language. In general, the cost per day incurred by the .Net developers are significantly higher than, the PHP developers.

PHP Ecommerce:

It now represents more than 80% of dynamic sites in the world; therefore, it is a leader in this category. The reason for his success is simple that it can implement all types of sites; it is completely free, including the tools for its modification. It is therefore, ultimately cheaper for the merchant to develop and maintain the ecommerce website in PHP with a quality performance.

2. Choosing a mode - Custom, Proprietary, or Open-source:

Once a merchant chooses a programming language, the next step is to choose a mode or it’s called platform.

There are three modes, 

Custom E-commerce:

In principle, each site is different. The custom ecommerce software company (e.g. Ydeveloper) is responsible for the production of the site, which begin from scratch and build the complete ecommerce solution for his client. The benefit of this method is to acquire a final site ideally suited to the customer's request, both in terms of functionality and in terms of affordability. This is the most effective solution for customizing an ecommerce website. Choose Ydeveloper for Custom Ecommerce…

Proprietary E-commerce:

In these cases, the agency has developed its own 'skeleton' of the e-commerce site, and proposed to the Merchant, with any necessary modifications.

Open source E-commerce:

E-commerce is not a new activity, excessively back and forth the world. Ecommerce Developers come together in as a community and build the most powerful engine or ecommerce software in their eyes. Sometimes these communities are backed by a commercial structure. When their engine is completed, these communities make it available for online merchants, free of charge. If the engine is pleasurable, thousands or even hundreds of thousands of ecommerce websites around the world will adopt it, each of which can notify the community about the existence of a bug, a missing feature, etc and so it will automatically improve and enhance the quality of a particular open source ecommerce solution.

 

Many agencies then formed to develop the open source solution or the most interesting, offer these solutions to their customers. These are the examples of some of them:

• osCommerce
• Magento
• X-Cart
• RoR

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Scope for Automation on Ecommerce Websites

Thousands of ecommerce websites offering various products and services have been launched and disappeared from the Internet every day. Only few of them get attention of people. Why does this happen? What would be the reasons? The questions like these certainly come in your mind as a retailer. All these depend on the behavior of the customers towards your ecommerce website.

In traditional forms of business, buyers and sellers both have the face-to-face conversation about a product, its features; even there is a scope for bargaining the cost of product in some cases. In online business, all these follow up will be done through emails and other ecommerce tools available with a scope of automation.

Measuring usability or user’s behavior towards the top landing pages in your ecommerce store is the first step after launching your store. You can plan the areas of automation based on the usability testing report and consult an ecommerce website developer to create custom ecommerce design and add functionality for better opportunities of organizing of customer records, follow up with customers and customer engagement. These are the three main areas that dealt with consumers and should be automated to get more customer value towards your business, which will save hours of your valuable time.

See the user, merchant and the process in the below image to find the areas where automation required...

Certain areas that need to be considered for automation are as follows…

Organizing…

• List management
• Customer follow-up and history
• Contact Info

Processing…

• Order processing
• Order fulfillment
• Order confirmation

Follow up...

• Auto responder
• Welcome messages

Engagement…

• Thank you messages
• Shipping Status
• Order Status

You can keep track of all an above activities. You can import and export the list of customer records as well. Customers can get the confirmation of the orders they placed and shipped them successfully by getting the status from the auto responder. You can sort and part lists for e-mail marketing and add special customers to particular auto responder series.

Top Ecommerce Fears and Frauds and Tips to Minimize It!

Ecommerce is now a day one of the most popular ways of selling goods and services online. It grows as the internet users are rising all over the world. At the same time, those who are running a custom ecommerce store using the platforms like asp.net, php, etc. does not think over the ecommerce features that can create more anxieties to their prospective consumers. In this case, an online store owner has to make sure about the ecommerce services they are hiring from. SEO friendly ecommerce website is another aspect that can be considered before finding the best ecommerce web solutions providers.

The purpose of stating an above discussion is to minimize the ecommerce fears from the customer side. This discussion all about security and safety of the ecommerce store users to make them clear about the ecommerce fears they have in their mind during the time when they are visiting this store. You can hire ecommerce consulting services before planning to hire Ecommerce Development Company to build an ecommerce website.

I have tried to list out here major ecommerce fears coming from consumers and the next you will find the tips to minimize these kind of anxieties.

• Fears from credit card information being stolen
• It’s not a ‘real’ store
• You will sell my information
• I can’t tell what the product is really like
• Not being able to track the orders
• Needing help from a sales person
• If you don’t like it, I will be stuck with it

Look at the following tips, which help to minimize online shopping fears:

• The URL of an ecommerce website should be starting from “https” instead of “http”.
• Avoid clicking on the pop-ups and warning that indicate something wrong with its SSL certificate.
• Getting rid of malware will avoid possible attempt of hackers using software to capture key stokes and screen images.
• Manage password by storing sensitive data on management software that allows for entering information onto online forms without having to retype it each time.
• Consider one-time credit card numbers which can give additional protection
• Are you using computer to visit an online shop? If yes, then install an anti-virus, spy-ware software in order to protect you from hackers, virus etc.

I could be able to find out the above ecommerce fears and tips, what else that you feel to be included?