Choosing OS Commerce vs. Zen Cart Shopping Solution for Web Development

Today, diverse shopping carts are being used by e-retail outlets to enhance their e-commerce and Web Development activities and offer a unique experience to its customers. There is an exhaustive list of Shopping Carts that include Magento, PrestaShop, CubeCart, OpenCart and StoreSprite. Two of the major open-source Shopping Carts that have attained high popularity in the recent years are OS Commerce and Zen Cart. Many Web Development service providers offer these two Shopping Cart Solutions at a very large scale. However, it is proven that Web Developers do not embrace a single Shopping Cart solution completely, because of the fear of obsolescence or lock-in.

The comparison among OS Commerce and Zen Cart Shopping Cart has taken place by Webmasters at many levels, and this article, by no means, intends to be an extension of the same. This article instead discusses the benefits of both OS Commerce and Zen Cart in a little detail and helps you choose a sound Shopping Cart for your Web Development projects.

Zen Cart Shopping Cart for Efficient Web Development

For efficient Web Development, developers bank on Zen Cart Shopping Cart. Zen is free, extremely user-friendly, an easy-to-install and open-source shopping cart. More than the developers, Zen Cart is a Shopping Cart solution for shoppers. Zen Cart also offers various exclusive features like multiple payment support, varied shipping options, quantity discounts and coupons.

Zen Cart also features multiple customer modes and sales and discounts, unlimited category depth and display modes. It also efficiently supports XHTML template system and offers the liberty to use unlimited extra pages and several ad banners. Many Web Development Companies in India, believe that no Shopping Cart solutions comes as close as Zen when it comes to features and benefits.

OS Commerce for a Strong and Dedicated Shopping Cart

OS Commerce is an open source online shopping cart that offers a wide range of features to online e-commerce stores. Like Zen Cart, OS Commerce also supports multiple currencies and allows the customers to print invoices directly from the order screen. Many Web Development companies vouch for its easy database backup system, and effective Web Development processes.

OS Commerce Shopping Cart features a rich set of functionality that allows e-commerce owners to setup and maintain online stores with minimum efforts and absolutely no costs. Many Web Development, India, firms have Java proficient web developers and are solely dedicated to designing projects in Java language.

Hope this article has been able to provide some help to all those who are yet to decide between Zen and OS Commerce Shopping for their Web Development projects.

eCommerce Trends to Watch This Holiday Season

Black Friday and the holiday shopping season are fast approaching, and customers know this just as well as retailers. Based on last year, between Labor Day and mid-November we can expect online customers to change their behavior by deferring purchases. As an industry, we have conditioned our customers to expect exceptional offers in the run up to Black Friday.

At SeeWhy, we track both conversions and shopping cart abandonment rates, and you can see this change in behavior in the data. Shopping cart abandonment rates normally average 70 percent, i.e. 7 out of every 10 people that place items in the shopping cart do not complete the transaction. But last year from Labor Day through November 15, the number of online sales fell by almost 56 percent compared with the volume for the previous month, and the shopping cart abandonment rate shot up, peaking at 83 percent.

But once holiday promotional offers were rolled out, the transaction volumes rose sharply, and the abandonment rate fell dramatically. You can see this in the graphs below.

Note also how the day of the week is very significant: During the weekends, customers were researching, not buying. The pattern of high shopping cart abandonment rates during the weekend is normal throughout the year as customers research online before potentially making a purchase during the week. However, this pattern was much more pronounced from mid-September through mid-November, reflected in a peak abandonment rate for the year.

What happened in mid-November, of course, was that Black Friday-specific promotions were being rolled out across the board, triggering seasonal buyingnot browsingbehavior and the ramp up to the peak on Cyber Monday.

Based on last years pattern, we should expect that, until the big Thanksgiving promotions get rolled out in mid-November, many customers will defer purchases, having become conditioned not to purchase online but to wait.

This reinforces what we have known for decades; promotions shift the timing of revenues and may not provide significant lift overall.

Well be monitoring both the discounting trends and the shopping cart abandonment rates through the rest of the holiday season, and it will be interesting to see whether the Holiday 2010 will be a rerun of 2009.

Helpful Tips for Making a Good E-Commerce Website

E-Commerce is the buying and selling of goods and services over the electronic medium like Internet. This is not just all but it has involved so many other major tasks like supply chain management, electronic fund transfer, Internet marketing etc. Having an e commerce web site is not enough these days, but a good, comfortable and amazingly functional website is required. It should appeal to the potential customers only then they would come to the website and make purchases. If even once you fail to provide them good user experience, you will lose the business. As there are hundred of websites available on Internet. There are plenty of choices available to the customers to select the best suitable for themselves. Following are few tips so that you can make your e commerce website a success:

Let the users to explore and do not ask for registration first: Asking the readers to register first and then providing them with the facility of adding items in their cart is probably the major step where you can lose your customers. Allow the readers to explore all the information which he wants to have. Like by adding items, he might be checking the total amount or the transportation fee etc.

Informing the readers where they are: There should be proper headings, sub headings so that if the readers is exploring in the store in more than one sub level of navigation, he can easily come back to his previous position through some kinds of indication like (Home> one category> another category> product etc. )

Do not show unnecessary details unless asked: Simple things are always easy to perceive in the human mind where as we confuse ourselves and even others by giving out unnecessary long details about the product So, the tip is to keep the short basic information about the product as the standard feature of the product and there should always be an option for “looking into more details” if users want to go into.

Give the best visual experience of the product to the readers: The Audio visual aids work many times more than the simple text about the product. Since the readers are not able to touch the product or experience its functionality. So, keeping this in mind provide them with the best of images or any video (if required) so that the readers can have a prior idea about the product before he actually makes a purchase. The images shown should be of high quality and the videos should be clear and audible.

Search options and refinement benefits: When the search has been performed, keep the search bar in front having query in it with the search results so that users can modify their query. Also give your readers the advanced options like to select prices, colors, models etc. facilitating them to make a purchase on the spot.

Customer support: The customers buying online need instant support. The provision of live chat support on every page is a great help that you can provide them with.

Use a prior tested software: You have to check the functionality at every level like browsing, payment options, cart functions etc. so as to give your customers an enjoyable and comfortable experience.

All the very successful e commerce websites like eBay, Amazon.com, are not by chance, but they have provided their users with all the options that makes the shopping experience just superb.!!!

Magento Hosting and the Magento eCommerce Platform

Magento has been created for the ease of online dealers and other sellers so that they can manage their stores online. The very exciting and famous platform of e commerce brings several opportunities for the convenience of buyers and sellers over the internet. You can easily deal with the product and services online.

Magento also helps in creating search engine optimization friendly web stores. Magento hosting provides very convenient place for the online store user and it is also very useful for the ecommerce. Magento hosting has various tools offered for the convenience of the people. You can easily get all the marketing tools, SEO and catalog management services with the help of Magento. It is highly sophisticated administrative system provides good interface for the users. Magento can provide you 24 hours accessibility of your online stores.

Reliable Hosting

If you have to invest in co-location hosting, be sure your provider allows your potential customers to do online shopping 24/7. Your availability is an important determinant in the success of your venture. Customers can always rely on a functional store anytime. With the fast and reliable downloads, you have the assurance that your store will never be out of charge. When your site is working real time, it will mean more profit for you. The sophisticated software system, hardware and highly-qualified hosting experts are the key for the great service that you and your clients will enjoy.

User-Friendly Shopping Environment

One good feature of Magento hosting is the environment it creates for your site. Merchants and shoppers benefit from the improved cart experience. When customers enter your site and they see your open cart system, your products appear more appealing, and thus, the rate of conversion is higher. Because signing up can be a discouragement to some customers, Magento hosting allows the client to check out without the need to sign up. With multiple transactions in a single order, purchasing is a breeze. The unlimited webpage allows you to upload more information to help your clients make an informed decision. With a better shopping environment, you can boost your income in just few days after subscribing to Magento hosting.

The various features offered by magento are: –
order editing
multi currency support
comparison of products
guest checkout
free shipping option
order tracking and management
easy search options
manifold images per product

Find Out How to Optimize Your E-Commerce Website for the Search Engines

If your intention is to use SEO on your e-commerce site, then you should plan to make things work properly. This article will explain to you how it is not that hard to apply SEO to your website.

Be certain that there is a list that talks about your products. Every last one of your products must have its very own unique description. Include the respective primary keywords for the products in this description. Search engines will supply a webpage ranking based upon the information the website provides.

So, by creating a open description, you are helping them to rank your webpages based upon the correct keywords. For every keyword that is optimized on your website, it will be one of the reasons for why your website is receiving targeted traffic from the search engines. It can be compared to owning numerous little streams of traffic that is sent via the search engines and getting it all in one location. Avoid using session IDs when you apply for your e-commerce site URLs. This is because this type of URL is not easy for the search engine spiders to crawl and get indexed. They are not made for the customer’s convenience either because they cannot be bookmarked or save, which means they will eventually run out. So, if you really want to get the most benefit from your website, then you should use URLs that are both search engine friendly and have your particular keywords imbedded in them. This will make it more convenient for the search engine spiders to see it.

Focus on using the product feeds for your e-commerce site to your advantage. If you must absolutely have an example, then use Google Base. Applying this application means you can upload an XML product feed, which will let you show your products via Google Base. This will not only help you to contact your targeted audience, but it will also give your website more visibility. Using the search engines the right way is all about understanding utilizing such fundamental factors and making them work in your favor to get traffic.

Even e-commerce websites can apply SEO the right way and get a high ranking the same way that the huge content sites ca.