What does a successful e-commerce website really need

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There are many different options available when it comes to setting up an E-commerce website, but no matter how you go about it, you will need a full array of options when establishing your website in the beginning.

It goes without saying that before you can even begin to think of the setup and design of the ecommerce website, you need to have a business plan drawn up to cater for your product, your marketing plans, and your outline for future growth. Once you have a suitable product and plan to generate traffic and direct it to your website, you can then outline what you want for a fully functioning ecommerce website.

Of the features available, you will need the following, at the very least:

Hosting

Layout and Design

Logo creation (if you don’t already have a company logo)

CMS (content management system) for your products and listing and pricing

Shopping cart integrated into a payment gateway

Order tracking system / database

System reporting

For any ecommerce website that is selling physical (or non-physical) goods, these are the items which you will need to consider when setting up your site.

For hosting, you can either approach a hosting company directly, or approach a decent web designer. The web designer will be able to handle the logo creating for your company logo, and will integrate this into your layout and design for your website as well. They will, usually, also know where the cheaper options are for hosting, and will be able to direct you to a suitable company for this, often being able to set it up for you. Alternatively, often hosting companies provide the same services (by having an in-house developer and designer) as a package, and you will be able to use one of their website templates for your site.

The shopping cart system can either be done by yourself, or by hiring a developer, or by getting a ready-made shopping cart system integrated into your site (your web designer/developer will be able to do this for you). The cart will generally integrate into a payments processing provider, so you’ll need to discuss with a provider about having credit card payments made on your site, and about having the provider take payments and settle with you directly.

Any decent ecommerce website will keep track of its own stock and orders, and will integrate its own stock and sales reports with those that are returned by the payments processing provider. You will then need to do reconciliations with the provider to make sure that all the orders that are processed were paid for, and that the provider settled all payments to you by the required date. The providers are usually quite strict about you maintaining your own records, so keeping track of your own orders is a good idea.

Overall, it is quite simple to do the entire ecommerce website yourself (or with the help of contracted IT professionals), but there are also alternatives out there, where you can purchase an entire, ready-made package. It’s just a matter of looking, and gauging what works best for your situation.

About Webmama

Webmama.co.uk is a leading provider of ecommerce website and shopping cart website solution in the UK. We have packages that suits every budget, with industry leading client centric service and competitive, honest prices, it’s no wonder 1500+ worldwide customers look to Webmama.co.uk for all their ecommerce solution needs.

Were excited to offer you a completely free 14 day trial to evaluate our software with zero risk (no credit card required). Were sure that once you see what our E-commerce website can do, youll know its the right choice for your business and your online success.

Contact: 44 (0) 845 634 4586

Source: webmama.co.uk

RELATED LINKS: www.webmama.co.uk

Importance of Chat Support to Small Businesses

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Thinking that you can achieve online business success with a plain website that simply displays your product is a big mistake you should remedy as early as now. With technology continuously evolving, consumers are expecting more and more from online shops.

They want the convenience of shopping from home yet an experience close to that when shopping at a local store. One of the things they look for is the assistance they get from staff.

They usually have questions and they want answers. One way to meet this need is to get a live chat for website.

THE CONVENIENCE OF LIVE CHAT

Live chat is convenient for consumers. Even when shopping online, many consumers want to get help (when they need it) from a real person. What is surprising is that most of them would choose live chat support over assistance via phone or email.

Live chat is just more convenient than dialing a toll free number or composing a long email that contains all their concerns. Moreover, live chat for website usually involves a shorter wait time than call centers.

Emails are usually answered within 24 to 48 hours. Consumers want prompt answers.

TAKING ADVANTAGE OF CONSUMERS LOVE FOR LIVE CHAT

Take advantage of live chat support. With a live chat box on your website and a high number of consumers using it, you can double your sales and build or improve your customer base. It is best to have a team that can answer live chat queries 24/7.

While you can be offline, wont it be great for you and your potential customers if there is a communication channel available round the clock?

SAVE ON LIVE CHAT SOFTWARE

Live chat for website has become cheaper than ever with several companies that offer similar programs. You can find an affordable live chat software and get all the necessary features. Just do your part conduct research before making a purchase.

Compared with phone support, live chat offers big savings to business owners. For instance, when the line is breaking up, callers tend to hang up and businesses would have to make a callback, which costs a few bucks, to salvage the sale.

With live chat for website, costs are reduced because the average interaction cost is also reduced.Save on Payroll with livechat

Moreover, you can reduce payroll expenses. Skilled live chat support representatives can handle several chat sessions simultaneously. Some live chat programs offer canned responses, making answering frequently asked questions fast.

Whether you have just started your online business or have been online for quite a while and want to boost your conversion rate, getting live chat for website is definitely a wise thing to do.

Provide consumers a convenient way to reach you. While phone and email work, adding a live chat box to your website can help a lot, especially in establishing your involvement.

Take advantage of consumers love for live chat support by meeting their expectations in terms of the quality and speed of customer service. Save on customer service expenses and see your conversion rates and sales soar.

Expand Your Small Business return On Investment (ROI) With Ecommerce Options

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ecommerce remedies will be the fantastic for all who’ve their very own company web site and facing the problem to acquire plenty of returns from that; moreover, if they may be thinking to try and do some updates by which their guests will flip into customers. In the current market you can obtain the a lot of ecommerce website remedies service provider which can be focused to provide the e-commerce solutions company to your active site entrepreneurs in addition as merchants. So, raise the earnings graph of our company with utilization of the ecommerce solutions.

Ydeveloper stands with ‘Reliability, Experience, Good quality and Customer Satisfaction’. Our commitment towards good quality operate makes us a strong performer in entire world.

Magento Store Management You Can Do That on Your Own!

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Magento shopping cart is claimed to be one of the largest and the most well-known e-commerce platforms that gained trust of numerous business owners in different branches of web business. This shopping cart is utilized by such business titans as Nokia, Olympus, Samsung, Lenovo and plenty of others. Even so, a good deal of merchants refuse to work with this platform in favor of some much less refined and well developed. The characteristic feature of Magento e-commerce platform is its very elaborate construction and functionality. This attracts some business owners and scares off others, who consider working within this platform very challenging.

When an ordinary web business manager gets to working with Magento, he/she encounters a number of issues. To get the hang of its functioning and use all the attributes to the fullest a person really should have programming skills. An additional alternative is usually to employ a person who would do this work for you. Not each manager would be pleased to spend additional money and let an unknown person manage his or her business enterprise.

Should you need to use Magento shopping cart, youll need a lot of extensions and modules, which would make your work not as much tedious. They really simplify the whole process, but having to pay for all of them will not be a really profitable option.

One more way out of this situation is Store Manager for Magento. This is a windows based app that is aimed at effortless administration of your on-line store. What on earth is so peculiar about this software? First of all, it simplifies a good deal of tasks which appear to be much too challenging to tackle on your own. Within this program you can manage your items, add and edit product attributes, organise your goods into a category tree, keep track of all your orders and so on. This system allows you to accomplish operations with numerous products at once. You are able to assign new price, discount or product attribute to a thousand products in several seconds.

Store Manager for Magento doesnt require from you any programming competencies. It could be very easily operated by an regular personal computer user. As for the installation, its a really quick and easy process. It is possible to download a demo version from the official web site of Store Manager for Magento and try it right away. All you should do to obtain access to all of the attributes of the software program is buy the license.

The functionality of this software program is fairly impressive. Product Management and Category Management sections allow you to create, edit and delete products and categories respectively, modify the present product attributes and create the new ones. Using the help of Customer Management you can organize all of the information about your customers in one location. Store Manager for Magento also gives an efficient solution for orders management. The corresponding option makes it possible for you to arrange all of the orders, filter them by any time period and export to excel .csv file.

For more advanced users theres Raw Table Editor that enables you to work with your database tables directly.

Store Manager for Magento is a software, that helps make Magento management far more user-friendly and accessible to all varieties of company owners. It combines the features of a variety of extensions and simplifies all of the tasks you ought to accomplish. Its always up to you to decide what would suit your needs most of all, but a great deal of online store owners have definitely confirmed: Store Manager for Magento is an excellent opportunity to save your time, energy and money and turn your store management from a tedious procedure into a pleasant activity.

Introduction to Leading Open Source eCommerce Web Application Magento

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Magento is an open-source ecommerce web application created by Varien which was later re-christened as Magento Inc. It was launched on March 31st 2008 and it is built on the components of Zend Framework. Magento is available under the Open Software License version 3.0. The Magento Enterprise Edition (paid edition) which is aimed at larger companies was launched on 15th April 2009; this version provides a service agreement with Varien.

Those involved in eCommerce need an affordable, flexible design option when putting up their online stores. Magento was designed to meet this need. This open-source eCommerce solution is offered for free download and allows users to design, set up, and run their own eCommerce stores with great flexibility. Magento supports installation of modules through a web-based interface accessible through the administration area of a Magento installation. Modules are hosted on the Magento eCommerce website as a PEAR server. Magento formerly worked with osCommerce. They originally planned to fork osCommerce but later decided to rewrite it as Magento. Magento officially started development in early 2007. Seven months later on August 31, 2007, the first public beta version was released. On May 30, 2010 Magento mobile was released, it allows store owners to create native mobile storefront apps.

Magento uses PHP as a web server scripting language and the MySQL Database. The data model is based on the Entity-attribute-value model that stores data objects in tree structures, thus allowing a change to a data structure without changing the definition of the database. Any community member can upload a module through the website and is made available once confirmed by a member of the Magento team. Modules are installed by entering a module key, available on the module page, into the web based interface.

There are three categories of modules hosted on Magento Connect:
1. Core Modules
2. Community Modules
3. Commercial Modules

Core and Community modules can be installed from the administration area. Commercial module pages provide price information and a link to an external website. There are no limits to creativity with Magento. Magento is easy to install and at the same time easy to use. Magento is used in many websites and online stores and has been a one of the most used ecommerce web application since its release.