Ecommerce Development

Ecommerce Web Hosting

If you are looking to set up your own ecommerce website, in might e a good idea to look into hosting specifically designed for ecommerce. There are a few things that you might need for your ecommerce store that you might not have available in regular hosting.

For one thing, you are going to need to be sure that your hosting will support the ecommerce software you plan to use. Obviously, an ASP shopping cart isn't going to work on a Linux web server. There are also several components to accepting credit card payments on line that you may not be aware of. For example, does your webhost offer curl? What about SSL installation?

These are just a couple of things that a professional ecommerce web host has already thought of for you. Web hosts that specialize in ecommerce can help make the ecommerce learning curve a little less steep, allowing you to focus more of your time and energy on what you do best.

As with any thing else that you shop for you should look at the price and the reliability of the hosting service. A good example is McKremie, where they offer full service ecommerce web hosting, at near the same rats that many other web hosts offer for their basic service. Great deals like this can be easily found, with a little time and research. Your new ecommerce storefront will be worth it.

PayPal vs Merchant Account/Payment Gateway

I've been around the ecommerce world quite a few times now, from the old days of Agora, to osCommerce, to Zen-Cart, Cube Cart and a dozen other derivatives. And eCommerce is great to play around with, but the bottom line is about making money. In order to make money, you've got to receive it, in the form of credit card processing.

If you have a brand new business and a brand new shopping cart, PayPal is probably the quickest and easiest way to accept credit card payments. Unfortunately, using PayPal exclusively adds a few additional pages to a customer's checkout, as they have to go through your checkout process and then are re-directed to PayPal's website, and they have to go through a couple more pages there to make payment. When considering the additional length PayPal adds to a checkout, and the slightly higher than industry standard PayPal charges per transaction, at some point it just makes more sense to get your own merchant accounts.

Given a choice between paying with PayPal, or paying with a credit card right on your website, customers will almost always choose to pay with a credit card on your site. In order to accept credit cards on your site, you'll need a traditional merchant accounts and payment gateway. The merchant account is like a special bank account that only collects the money from your transactions, and then once per day will deposit all the funds in your regular bank account. The payment gateway is the web API that connects your website to your merchant account. My personal favorite payment gateway is Authorize.net. Usually, when you open a merchant account with a bank, you can get a payment gateway for free, or at a discounted rate. Fees for a merchant account are usually about 2.25%-2.50% of the transaction price, plus around $0.25 per transaction. There's also a monthly fee of around $25-$30 per month for processing and clerical work. That comes in a little lower than PayPal's 2.9% processing, and if you are processing thousands of dollars per month, it can save you quite a bit of money, plus you won't lose customers to the additional length of the checkout process. Not to mention that being able to accept credit cards on your site just looks a little more professional.

Review of Ashop Commerce

shopping cart solution. Today, I'm reviewing Ashop Commerce, a hosted shopping cart provider that offers complete, out of the box shopping cart software for merchants to be able to focus on selling their products online. I started by checking out the 'online demo' provided by Ashop, and they offered 2 different shops for demonstration purposes. Both of the shops have a functional catalog, easy to navigate, and properly categorized. It looks like it has all of the stock checking and attribute support you would want from an ecommerce solution. One thing I noticed that I'd want to change is that when you add an item to the cart, you are not immediately taken to the cart, so it's a little bit difficult to see that you've added anything at all to the cart. Also, I noticed that some product attributes are displayed, even though they are out of stock. I'm sure there are options in the admin of this software to tweek both of these. What I was really interested in checking out, though, was the checkout process. As anyone in the ecommerce business knows, the longer a checkout is, the more customers you lose. I have yet to see an out of the box solution with an easy 3 step process. Unfortunately, neither of these demo's were working when I tried to check out. I assume they have the checkout process disabled for security purposes. In any event, this hosted, all inclusive ecommerce solution looks to have promise, and I hope they continue to improve on their online demos to further demonstrate the checkout abilities of their ecommerce software.

Web Based Merchant Retail Software

Point of Sale (POS) software is important to any merchant in the retail industry. But when you are just getting started in business, how do you know what point of sale software to use? You don't have to be an expert in the IT industry to know that web based pos software is more flexible and dynamic than the typical desktop client implementation. some of the advantages of using a web based point of sale client solution rather than a desktop installed one are faster, easier installations, easier upgrades, a centralized meta data repository, and less money spent on IT overall.

We took some time to review the web based POS solution provided by Merchantos.com, and were pleasantly surprised with the intuitiveness and flexibility of the tool. It offers support for multiple registers, allowing the cashier to log into their register on the first page after logging in. It also supports refunds, product inventory, work orders, rentals, customer credit accounts, and more. It's also got a very impressive set of operational reporting capabilities, including everything from sales, to layaways, to payments, and even some aggregated analytical reports. Get started right now with a web based POS for your retail business. All you need is a computer and Internet connection.

Internet Business Talk Review

One of the more interesting websites I've reviewed lately is iBusinessTalk.com. This is a relatively new blog dedicated to discussion about how to make money online. some recent articles include various pay per click ad campaigns, and the results of using them. They were very quick to point out the potential adding addition income through the monetization of your personal blog. They also have an interesting discussion about the rumor that eBay is going to buy StumbleUpon. I had not heard the rumor yet, and stumbleupon is one of my favorite websites. anyways, if you are interested in making money online, add this blog to your reading material.

Niche eCommerce Example - DC/DVD Mailers from Buskerdoo

Our latest review is about a new niche ecommerce store, Buskerdoo.com. They offer various electronic media protection products and accessories such as labels, CD sleeves, photo mailers jewel case inserts and CD storage products. In my opinion, they've targeted a perfect niche market because people are beginning to realize that if you need to send electronic media in the mail, you want ot make sure they are protected with cd/dvd mailers.

eCommerce is a MONSTER

Monster Cart is an ASP.Net Shopping Cart aimed at end user e-commerce site owners looking for an all inclusive e-commerce solution, and web developers integrating an ASP.Net version 2 shopping cart function into an existing site. In either case full technical support and advice is provided.

A range of complementary e-commerce services are also available including web hosting, domain name registration, online marketing, pay per click advertising, email marketing, and e-commerce consultancy.

How to start learning PHP Programming?

One great place to get start learning about PHP and PHP News is the PHP Tutor.
For starters, they have prepared a totally syndicated tutorial section that lists all of the Latest PHP Tutorials to keep you updated.
You will also find useful PHP discussion links and recommended PHP scripts that have been downloaded by many PHP developers. Check them out today.

Prevent Spider Sessions = TRUE

Continuing out discussion of SEF URLS, another common misconception is that URLs with SIDs (Session Identifications) are not SEF. I often hear people ask how to get rid of the SID in their URL so that search engine spiders will index them, or rank them higher.

Credit Card Fraud on the Rise in Ecommerce

Credit card fraud is where a merchant is tricked into releasing merchandise or rendering services, believing that a credit card account will provide payment for goods/services. The merchant later learns that they will not be paid, or the payment they received will be reclaimed by the card's issuing bank. Today, half of all credit card fraud is conducted online agaisnt small ecommerce stores that have little or no credit card fraud protection.