How to Install and Set Up Wordpress wp-ecommerce Shopping Cart

How to Install and Set Up Wordpress wp-ecommerce Shopping Cart Video Tutorial

Tutorials Topics :

1. Setup e-commerce shopping cart theme and styles
2. Check-out setting
3. Setup product by categories
4. Setup widgets
5. Install plugins
6. Store settings
7. Currency settings
8. Presentation settings
9. Product page settings
10. Button settings
11. Add cart button
12. Shopping cart settings
13. Thumbnail settings
14. Pagination settings
15. Admin settings
16. Track setting
17. Customer receipt settings
18. Tax settings
19. Shipping settings
20. Payment settings
21. Marketing settings
22. Import settings
23. Dashboard settings
24. Add new product settings
25. Manage product images
26. Price control
27. Stock control

Video Source : http://www.marketwebsitedesign.com
How to Install and Set Up Wordpress wp-ecommerce Shopping Cart Video Tutorial

E-Commerce Services - Look Upon Quality

What is E-Commerce?

E-Commerce is briefly used term for Electronic Commerce. E-Commerce simply means the buying and selling of products or services using electronic channels, basically internet. We no longer belong to the time where one needs to be physically present in the marketplace to sell or by the products. In this modern age of Science and Technology, we have the most convenient solution to our business through E-Commerce. The big deals of our business come to our palms at any of our own comfortable place at any time in 24 hours. The features of e-commerce like 24/7 availability, global reach, efficient services, enough space for business to consumer interaction are the virtues to the modern corporate world.

E-commerce gives to the service providers and takers a platform to electronically exchange goods and services with no barriers of time or distance. Electronic commerce has expanded rapidly over the past some years and has become mandatory for any business firm to have e-commerce services. In the near future the "conventional" commerce will be completely replaced by "electronic" commerce.

Quality E-Commerce Services:

Quality means both functional, operational and its look and feel that comforts the customers in the better way. Every organization should strive to convert the needs of the users into wants by delivering quality products and services. The organization which adjusts themselves in the changing environment will succeed else will lose on oblivion. The conversion of physical organization to virtual organization can be done with the use of this technique of business. The required software applications and the hosting agencies for this application are growing day after day. Thousands of E-Commerce applications have already been hosted and the numbers are growing day by day. This helps to reduce the physical efforts and the time almost most of the tasks can be done within the click of the mouse button rather than appearing physically for each subsequent task.

Experts of e-commerce services will offer their clients a variety of open source E-Commerce solutions which may include open source shopping cart. Clients can make use of the shopping cart software to customize your website to your liking. Aside from this plus point, many e-commerce services will offer hosting services, create a one stop store to display as many services and products as possible, offer advice and tips on content management, provide high quality SEO services to draw in potential customers, make your online store a user-friendly one and design it with utmost flexibility and creativity.

The writer is a freelancer writing for various websites, magazines and newspapers.

Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Sunita_Rai

Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/8999276

Why Should You Do A Test Run Of Your eCommerce Website?

Everyday we receive an inquiry of some young entrepreneur who wants to make the next Amazon-like or Facebook-like website. They all have big dreams and are highly ambitious, which is a really amazing thing. In fact, even our colleagues and impaneled web developers get such inquires regularly. But more than 90% of such online entrepreneurs are not able to take their businesses off the ground for a long period of time. In fact, some eCommerce websites are not even able to survive till their next renewal date. One of the main reasons which we noticed is because they refused to start small or have a scalable plan. Everyone wanted to start big overnight, but the problem was that they were gambling on other people's money. This article explains why it is most important to do a test run of your eCommerce website, before you put it into a production environment.

Hardware Resources

Knowing what hardware your website requires can be determined only when you have a live website with real users using it. This may be simulated before you push your site into a production environment, using various benchmarking tools. Else you may want to push your site into a production environment and test it out live, with real products and services. A Test Run of a live website on a small scale is ideal for any type of business or website. Hardware like RAM, CPU, Processing Power etc. are all dependent on the type of website you are going to host. You also need to know how much content each user will pull and for how long. If you are offering some online service, like audio or video streaming, you may not fit into a shared hosting plan. Similarly, if you are hosting a small eCommerce site with only a couple of products, investing in a dedicated or VPS Server maybe a waste of money.

Hiring Employees

How many people do you need to man your eCommerce website? Will all the automation in your website help you reduce your actual work force? Or will you still need supervisors and managers? This depends mainly on the real experiences that you will have and how well your team will be able to handle the load. This is exactly the reason why you need to start testing with a small manageable website and then scale up to whatever size you can afford. The whole purpose of having an eCommerce website and not a brick and mortar store is so that you can sell your products globally, without much human intervention. Everything should be automatic and systematic.

Logistics

If you thought that setting up an eCommerce website is as easy as putting a blog together, you are wrong. An eCommerce site has several different intricacies which you need to deal with in order to gain satisfied customers. Choosing a payment gateway, choosing a courier or delivery company, storing the goods, labelling and packaging are all part and parcel of selling products online. All companies attempt to cut costs by optimizing these "aids to trade" and reducing any wastage in the distribution channels. You can try and test various vendors and various allied services extensively, when you have a website. This way you won't burn your fingers (very badly) and will be able to test the waters of your industry before stepping up your operations.

Target Audience

Although you may have pre-decided on whom your target audience should be, you will realize that things may change over time and you may have to change your own perception about your business. For determining successfully, which Socio Economic class of persons you should target and which geographic location should you market yourself to, your website statistics will play an important role. The only limitation in determining this is that you need to have a live website to test-launch your product or service. This is where the test website plays an invaluable role. Within 6 months of running the test website, you should be able to determine exactly how your campaigns and marketing is working out and whether it is bringing in the desired revenue or you should fish out greener pastures to hunt for clients.

Marketing Strategy

A website can be a game changer for your market or industry and you maybe able to break many psychological barriers with a successful website. But how should you market your product? Is online advertising working out for you? You can find this out only when you have a website up and running. But you can't necessarily take a chance with a full scale website, which depends on the money of many investors. Instead of taking such a huge risk, you might as well start small and build on your website swiftly. This will allow you to gauge the pulse of the market and help you understand new trends and techniques which are helping you get customers. Unlike selling offline, eCommerce websites have the ability of tracking and determining exactly how the customer came to your website and what influenced his decision to buy a product or leave your website.

Got a Domain Name? If not then get a FREE Standard Domain Name with every annual Unlimited Hosting Plan at HostingXtreme. We offer the most affordable web hosting prices and the best quality of service. To know more visit us at our website.

Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Alex_H_D

Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/9003467

3 Of The Best Website Builders For Your E-Commerce Website

The site builder that you choose for your online store has a great impact on how your customers are satisfied with the products that you have to offer. The cool thing is that there are many builders to choose from. Some of the most reputable builders that you can go with include:

Weebly

It's one of the most reputable sites that you can go with. The cool thing with it is that it's very easy to use; therefore, you can create a full store and customize it within a very short time even if you don't know how to code.

To design your page you only need to drop elements in their right places. Here you need to organize the elements by simply dragging them into columns and rows. The main advantage with this builder is that it's smooth and doesn't have bugs or hiccups like other builders.

Squarespace

It's powerful and extremely flexible. One of the most striking features of the site is the templates. The site has 32 templates which come with unique structures. For example, the shift template places the logo at the top left while the navigation is placed at the top right. The template also comes with an option of a large splash image on the homepage.

The native template on the other hand is designed to showcase content. Due to this its ideal for bloggers.

Wix

Wix is another popular website builders that was very popular a while ago when flash websites were the thing. When the popularity of flash websites declined, Wix had to redefine itself and now you are able to create Javascript/ HTML5 websites.

The builder is a true drag and drop editor. This means that you can literally drag elements anywhere on the page. This makes it easy for you to design your website. The dragging and dropping feature ensures that you are able to design your site even if you don't know how to code.

The main flaw with Wix is that it doesn't have a truly mobile website. Due to this you end up having two separate websites (desktop and mobile websites). This tends to make the experience and branding of your site inconsistent.

Conclusion

These are just some of the popular sites. There are many others that you can go for. When choosing a website builder, always go for one that is easy to use. You should also go for one that has excellent customer support that will help you in times of trouble.

Best e-commerce website builder is also a great tool to go with. In addition to being easy to use, it also has an excellent customer care. To know more about it visit http://www.bestecommercewebsitebuilders.com

Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Duncan_Lancer

Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/9005078

What is the Best Shopping Cart Software For Your Ecommerce Website?

Searching for the best shopping cart software for you ecommerce website can be a daunting task. There are literally hundreds of carts and ecommerce solutions available. How do you know which one is right for you?

You should consider the following factors when you are searching for a shopping cart that fits your needs.

• What is a shopping cart?
• How much does it cost?
• Should I buy or lease a cart?
• What Features Should I Look For?
• What Kind and How Much Support Does will I get?
• Which Payment Gateways Work with the Cart?
• What Hosting/Server Platform is Required?
• What if I Need Customization?
• What is a Shopping Cart?

First, let me define a shopping cart or ecommerce website. In the most basic terms, a shopping cart is software that allows you to list your products on a web site and then automatically collect fees when a customer buys products from your website.

For example, lets say that you sell vitamins from your home, and now you want to start selling them on your website. First, you need shopping ecommerce software. You will also need to have a business bank account and a payment gateway, a service that allows you to automatically process credit cards on your web site.

Once you have the cart software set up on your website, you can add your vitamin products to the website using a web browser. The software allows you to add product images, descriptions, prices, shipping and tax rates, and so on. Once your cart is populated with all of your products, you can start selling them on the web.

Here's how it works: A customer comes to your web site and adds products to her shopping cart. When she is ready to buy the products, she enters her shipping and credit card information in a form so you know where to ship the product and whom to charge it to. When the customer clicks the button to submit the order, the shopping cart uses your payment gateway (credit-card-processing service) to validate the credit card and then transfer the money from the customer's credit card to your bank account. Then it's up to you to ship the product.

You can also use a shopping cart to sell digital, or downloadable products such as electronic books, music, and software.

How Much Do Shopping Carts Cost?

As you might expect, shopping carts come in a wide range of prices, from free to thousands of dollars. Does that mean that the more you spend, the better cart you get? Not necessarily.

There are several free shopping carts that are very powerful and full of features; for example, OSCommerce and ZenCart. Both of these carts are completely free and offer most of the features you would expect in a modern shopping cart: unlimited products, connections to the major payment gateways, credit card payments, real-time shipping prices, discount customer groups, multi language, and more.

Unfortunately, there is a downside to free: free products lack good documentation and support. For example, there is no official support group that you can call when you need help. And there is no official user's guide to explain how to use the software. You usually have to search through user forums to find answers to your questions.

Free shopping carts are probably not be the best choice if you are new to ecommerce and are trying to do everything yourself.

Fortunately, there are many commercial carts in the range of $100-500 that offer lots of features. The carts in this range usually have some kind of support system to help you with problems, and they usually have documentation to explain how to use their software. X-Cart and Ecommerce Templates are two carts between $150 - $200, and both are very powerful and relatively easy to use.

Should I Buy or Lease a Shopping Cart?

There are two basic models for online shopping carts:

Pay a one time fee for the software and install it on your web server: This can be a daunting task unless you are comfortable working with Linux web servers and configuring web-based software. The good thing about this model is that you don't have to pay monthly fees, and the software is usually much more customizable than leased shopping carts. If you have the skills to install the software on your server, or if you hire a website designer to install and configure your shopping cart, this method is more economical than leasing.

Pay a monthly or yearly fee to lease the software: This model is easy to implement because you don't need to install, configure, or maintain any software. If you are going to do it yourself and have little web experience, this is the easiest way to get started. The downside is that leased software is often hard to customize and many ecommerce sites need some customization. Furthermore, it can be very expensive when you add in the cost of leasing over many years.

What Shopping Cart Features Should I Look For?

Most shopping carts come with standard features like unlimited categories and products, web-based administration, easy-to-use product creation screens, and tax and shipping calculation. Unfortunately, not all carts include all the functions YOUR business will need to operate an online store.

The following is a list of features to look for in a shopping cart:

Installation and Design

Easy-to-use web interface: 

A web interface allows you to administer your shopping cart from any web browser that is connected to the internet.

Shopping Cart Reporting: The ability to get detailed reports about your sales, inventory, states, users, categories, products, destination zones, taxes, shipping rates, orders, membership levels, etc.

Multiple Languages: The ability to display multiple languages in your shopping cart

Customer Support: Most carts usually provide email or forum-based support, but sometimes they provide live phone support.

Upgradeable: Find out if you can get free updates as the software is improved. Usually you can get free updates for 6 to 12 months.

Template-based Design: Tempate-based designs make it easier to customize the look of your website

WYSIWYG Editor for Products: This feature allows you to enter product text and images using a word-processor-like editor.

Content Pages: Does your cart allow you to create content pages? For example, can you create an "About Us" page?

Mini-Cart: A mini cart is a small box that indicates if the user has items in their shopping cart. These are usually located on the top or side of the page. Most carts have this feature.

Customer Features

Newsletter Function: Do you need to ability to send mass emails to your customers? Many carts come with the ability to send emails to customers.

Customer Order / Customer Account / Customer Registration: The ability for your customers to view their account and their order history.

Product Search: A search tool for your products. This function is especially helpful if you have more than 20 or 30 products.

Googlecheckout: Google Checkout is a new service that makes online shopping faster, safer and more convenient. Many carts have been updated so they work with Google Checkout.

Wish list: A "Wish List" allows your customers to save products to a wish list. That way they can come back to your online store at a later date and buy the products in the Wish List.

Send to friend: This feature displays a form that allows customer to enter a name and email address so the can send a link of a product to a friend.

Memberships and special pricing: This feature allows you to create memberships on your store and then give them special prices or discounts.

Printable Invoices: The feature allows your customers to print their invoices.

Multiple Shipping Addresses: The feature allows customers to store multiple shipping addresses. This is a handy feature for customer who often ship gifts to friends and family members.

Store and Products

Unlimited Number of Products: This feature means you can list as many products as you like. With many leased shopping carts, the total number of products is limited by your plan. The more you pay, the more you products you can list.

Unlimited number of categories: Products are usually stored in categories; for example, Men's Clothing, Women's Clothing, Children's clothing.

Products can be assigned to multiple categories: This feature allows you to assign a product to more than one category.

Featured Products: This feature allows you to list feature products in a box or area on your home page.

Bestsellers: This feature automatically lists your best-selling products.

Related products: This feature allows you to relate one product to another product so the customer can see products that are related to the product they are looking at.

Unlimited product options and option price modifiers: This feature allows you to add options to products, and the options can add or subtract from the product price. For example, T-Shirts come in sizes Small, Medium, and Large and colors Red, Green, and Blue.

Custom Input Fields for Products: This allows you to add fields to products. For example, if you sell custom greeting cards, you can use a custom field so the customer can enter a custom message to be printed on the card.

Unlimited number of product images: This feature allows you to add more than one product image for a product.

Popup Product Images: This feature allows you to add popup images so your customer can see a larger, more detailed product image.

Manufacturers: This feature allows you to associate manufacturers with products.

Drop Shippers: This feature allows you to sell products that another company stocks and ships. When your store receives an order for a drop shipper product, the shopping cart sends an email to the drop shipper with the product and shipping information and that company ships the product to your customer.

Discount coupon codes and gift certificates: This feature allows you to sell gift certificates or to offer coupon discounts.

Inventory control: This feature allows you to enter the number of products you have in stock and then automatically makes a product "Unavailable" when there are no more products in stock.

Quantity discounts: This feature allows you to give discounts based on the quantity ordered.

Retail and wholesale price: This feature allows you to create a wholesale and retail price for any product.

Limit minimal order amount: The feature allows you to specify and minimum order amount.

Real-time USPS, FedEx and UPS shipping calculation: This feature allows you to provide realtime shipping calculations for USPS, FedEx, and UPS.

Shipping Label Generator for USPS and UPS

Allow your customers to choose delivery methods: This feature allows your customers to select a delivery method; for example, USPS, FedEx, or UPS.

Add handling fee: This feature allows you to add a handling fee per order.

Digital Electronic Downloads: This feature allows you to sell digital products such as E-Books, 

Music, or Software. Once a customer purchases a digital product, the cart sends them an email with a link to download the digital product.

Product-specific taxes: The feature allows you to charge a unique tax on any product.

Payment Gateways: This feature is VERY important. Most carts support many different payment gateways; for example, Authorize.net, Paypal, or 2CheckOut. If you already have a payment gateway, make sure the cart you purchase supports your gateway.

The ability to Optimize all pages for search engines: This important feature allows you to optimize your product and content pages for Google, Yahoo, MSN, and other search engines. This is a VERY important feature; if the search engines can't find your products, your customers can't find them either.

Multiple Administrator Accounts and Account Levels: This feature allows you to have multiple administration accounts. This feature is very handy if more than one person maintains your shopping cart.

What Kind and How Much Support Does the Shopping Cart Provide?

Shopping cart software and ecommerce is pretty complex and there are many opportunities for problems. Whatever shopping cart model you choose, be sure to consider amount and type of support offered by the leasing host or the software seller. Because a smooth operation of your website and shopping cart are necessary for financial success, you'll want to have appropriate support for emergencies.

Which Payment Gateways Work with the Shopping Cart?

If you are going to use a leased shopping cart, or you are going to buy shopping cart software, find out which payment gateways will work with the shopping cart.

Note: Each shopping cart provider builds their own interfaces for payment gateways.

What Hosting/Server Platform is Required?

Will your website and shopping cart be hosted on a Linux / UNIX server or a Windows server? If you are going to use a hosted shopping cart, you probably don't need to worry about this unless you already have other web-based software applications installed on your current web host.

If you are going to buy shopping cart software, your choice might be limited by your server choice. Currently there are many more shopping carts made for Linux / UNIX than for windows.

What if I Need Customization?

Every shopping cart I have installed, designed, and configured, has required some customization. In most cases, the client wanted to do something the cart did not do. For example, one client wanted the ability to send a custom email with specific products so he could send special instructions whenever a customer ordered a specific product. A few shopping carts have this ability, but most don't.

The best solution is to first determine your specific requirements and then find a cart that fits your needs. Unfortunately, it's hard to find a cart that does EVERYTHING you want it to do. If this is the case, you'll need to have some custom development done to add a new function to the cart.

Keep in mind that many popular shopping carts have dozens of Modifications and Plugins that you can add to the shopping cart software to make it fulfill your requirements.

Note: If you use a leased shopping cart, you will probably not be able to make modifications to the software.

See our competitvely-price ecommerce package

Pat Fortino is a website designer specializing in small business websites, ecommerce web sites, and Joomla Content Management (CMS) websites. If you are looking for an affordable solution, give us a call at 303-907-6133

writenowdesign.com

Web Sites

Technical Writing

Editing

Desktop Publishing

Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Pat_Fortino

Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/786318

Myriad of Ecommerce Shopping Cart Design Choices

As the popularity of ecommerce increases today, the demand for excellent ecommerce shopping cart designs also increases. Talented website designers and developers are diligent at creating cost effective and efficient ecommerce shopping cart designs on various platforms that would be able to handle ecommerce web business operations at different budgets.

The market offers a plethora of quality ecommerce solutions that serves to increase web traffic and sales conversions with a more enlightening user experience with online shopping.

Various choices

There are an increasing number of ecommerce shopping cart design and development services that can cater to the specific business requirements and objectives of any business company in any industry today.

Many business companies may opt for a Magento ecommerce shopping design that allows superior ecommerce apps and solutions which many top financial merchants prefer with online retail stores. This ecommerce shopping cart design is developed on PHP platform with an easy customization feature for enhanced business performance. Unique ecommerce Magento solutions are possible through the availability of Magento templates and ecommerce features that are outstanding from other choices.

A Magento ecommerce website can be optimized with appropriate ecommerce shopping cart designs and operation processes using integrated Google analytics to track traffic and trends. Multiple payment gateways are included in a Magento professional ecommerce website with rich CMS page to ensure a highly functional ecommerce website for any company.

Another exceptional ecommerce shopping design is the OsCommerce platform where this free source application allows an easy and quick development of the desired ecommerce website at a price that would fit most budgets. Appropriate add-ons with the CRE Loaded shopping cart enhance the ecommerce website performance that would be pleasing to the company.

Zen Cart proves to be a popular ecommerce software to develop a contemporary ecommerce shopping cart design as this user friendly tool is free and widely used by SMEs for online ecommerce store developments. A robust Zen Cart web business store site is expected through a customization of existing and new features and functions to ensure a smooth online shopping experience by web consumers.

An X-Cart shopping cart is ideal for unique templates to fit the business needs and objectives precisely. An X-Cart cart is a high quality solution for an ecommerce online store that uses multiple payment gateways that are secured and safe.

Right choice

Business companies can make their best ecommerce website developers choice through an evaluation of their business needs and operations with professional ecommerce service experts in the market.

Our internet marketing expert will help you in promoting your brand and business. We offer full range of web application development companies that guarantee to improve the visibility of your online business. Hire our link building services now!

Also read my Blog: http://alijahbrice.page.tl/leading-social-bookmarking-service.htm.

Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Alijah_Brice

Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/8113008

Selling Online - Ecommerce Shopping Cart Basics

An electronic shopping cart is simply a software program or code from a shopping cart provider that you can use on your website. This program or code allows visitors to select products and make purchases directly from you.

If you're selling anything online, you're considered part of the e-commerce business arena, and you absolutely need a cart.

Basic Forms

There are two basic forms of shopping carts. One form is software that is bought and used by the business itself. The other is using a service that will host your e-commerce site, kind of like buying hosting for your website.

So, you can either use a standalone piece of software on your own Web server or you can use code from an cart provider/service. Either way, you'll be able to sell from your website.

Along with its convenience, allowing you to sell digital and tangible products from your website, research shows that using a cart increases sales.

In 2009, PayPal conducted an internal study of 79,000 small merchants. It was discovered that adding a shopping cart increased their PayPal volume an average of 19% over a two-year period.

The Simplest and One of the Cheapest Ways to Sell from Your Own Website

I've used PayPal for quite a while now and can attest that it's easy and effective.

With the PayPal cart process, you create the shopping cart yourself. The instructions are simple to follow and you have a choice of using a single item Buy Button or a Drop-down Menu for multiple products or services. And, as with all services, there is a fee. PayPal charges 2.9% and .30 cents per transaction. That's not bad for all you can do with this service.

The PayPal system also has everything you need to customize your cart:

• Tax
• Shipping
• Discount and coupon codes
• Payment options
• Tracking
• Invoicing
• Testing before you go live
• And, more

In fact, PayPal is so popular a number of e-commerce shopping cart services have partnered with PayPal for their payment process. And, you can accept payments with your mobile device through another of PayPal's services.

Other Options

If you like the PayPal system, but would rather not have your customers sent to its site during the purchasing process, you have options.

PayPal has partnered with several shopping cart services, such as Cashie Commerce and 3D Cart. Using another service has its benefits, one of which is keeping the buyer on your site through the purchasing process, but there's a drawback to it, an additional cost.

These services charge a monthly fee, along with a percentage of each transaction. This is on top of the PayPal fees. So, be careful when looking into this process. Be sure you're making enough sales to warrant the additional costs involved.

Keeping it Simple

No matter which cart system you use, simple is the way to go online. You want the essential features in a shopping cart without making it too complicated to use. The process needs to be easy to use with clear instructions.

~~~~~
References:

http://www.webopedia.com/TERM/S/shopping_cart.html
https://www.paypal.com/us/webapps/mpp/shopping-cart

Want to take your online marketing up a notch? Get must-have writing and marketing information, right in your inbox. Join The Writing World newsletter. Get weekly tips and guidance, plus updates on instructional webinars. It's all free! And, you'll get "How to Create an Optimized Website." Go to http://thewritingworld.com and sign-up today.

Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Karen_Cioffi

Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/8342517