5 Ecommerce Website Designing and Marketing Trends to Follow in 2013

It’s time to customize your ecommerce website. I visualize huge impact of 5 major ecommerce trends to Ecommerce website in 2013. Here they are:
Many times I have heard that the ecommerce will now shift to the Mcommerce (mobile, smartphones and tablets). It's true that the accessibility of internet in Mobile and Smartphones have increased so far and it's become easy to atleast evaluate the products directly from the shopping sites, but the customers are still feeling unsafe paying for the product, so stuff like these are expecting to be enhanced in 2013.
Mcommerce Solutions
It’s not an end of the Ecommerce; it’s a beginning of Advanced Ecommerce. Technologies used for developing ecommerce sites have already upgraded, e.g. a new version of WordPress, HTML5, CSS3, and so on. Thus ignoring the use of latest technology may help your competitors to bang you.

WordPress-CSS3-HTML5 - Advanced Technologies
Resources:
Snippet showing on the Google Search isn’t been just the snippet, it has turned out to be Rich. You can also implement snippet code authorized by Google, e.g. Microdata, Microformats, RDFa etc. to demonstrate the rating, reviews and other product details directly on the Search result page. With this, the site can get more Clicks through Rate (CTR).
Rich Snippets for Products
Resources:
Running a blog aligned with the site is still a great source of generating traffic. Adding an Authorship markup is an added advantage of getting authority from Google. So, start setting up an Authorship profile to show up this on Google search results page with a profile picture of real author.
Authorship for Blog
Resource:
The Next big thing is Google Tag Management System, equivalent to CMS. For a large ecommerce website, it’s quite difficult to manage the various tags used in website for tracking and other purposes, e.g. Adwords, Affiliates etc. This tool stores all the tags at one place, which can be customized anytime and helps pages load faster, which eventually benefit to a conversion rate and SEO performance.
Resources:
So far, I have briefly discussed about five big new ecommerce trends in 2013. Now, it’s your turn!

Quick Tips for E-commerce Website to Increase Sales during Christmas

We thank our Custom Ecommerce Web Development and Internet Marketing Team to provide us some great information to boost traffic on upcoming Christmas Holiday Season. During this time, retailers are in a search of quick and easy tips to enhance their site for more visibility in search engine and boost up ROI. They already gathered collection of some unique Ecommerce features and functionalities and the developers who are ready to suggest and support you technically for the implementation of each feature while our marketing team has built a strategy for each online marketing channel – SEO, Social, PPC, Email, Newsletter etc.
Boost Ecommerce Hoilday Sales
Before further inquiries, you should look at the quick and Christmas safety tips as below and the features required enabling it.
    Shopping on Ecommerce Site during Christmas
  • Make delivery information prominent, ensure [site search] works well, have a clear returns policy
  • Highlight clear XMAS value/offers
  • Make sure people know they'll get their gifts in time
  • Add specific content for gift buyers, e.g. Christmas gifts for boyfriend
  • Promoting [checkout security] to reassure people who might be thinking about buying certain gifts
  • Highlight your gift wrap service if you have one, works especially well in [PPC ads]
  • Ensure site speed is optimized for peak traffic periods
  • Features of multi-faceted gift finder - drill down by person, gender, age, product type, personality etc
  • [Returns and delivery] information are important, and promote last delivery dates for an edge over the competition
  • Make sure the ecommerce website works well on mobiles!
  • Encourage people on to your mailing list with priority access to January sales
  • Don't kill general user experience by making everything about Christmas promotions
  • Implement product recommendation engines or merchandising ecommerce solutions for product ranking algorithms (based on gifts)
  • The [Deal of the Day] thing can work really well if it can be tweeted/shared or liked by users, so enable function for [sharing of product details on social networking websites]
  • Adding [live chat] or/and making customer service details more visible can help to convert shoppers who need inspiration
  • Marketing tip: Sign up for all your competitors' emails. Send your 'gift' emails before theirs where possible
  • There are done great low-cost and targeted banner ad options that can provide good ROI for retailers
  • Set up your paid marketing in advance to promote last delivery date and surplus stock ahead of sale period
  • Another voucher code tip: Bid on "[your brand] voucher code"; link to your offers page. Avoid blindly giving affiliate % away
  • [Refer a friend] campaigns are a great opportunity
  • Offer fast delivery to get as many last minute orders as possible
  • Check out the hashtag for some great [Christmas tips] to increase sales
Ecommerce Features to Boost XMAS Shopping Sales
Please [send us your request here] if you want to directly approach our e-commerce developers for consulting and implementing all above ecommerce features in affordable rates!


If you really like this post, please tweet, like, +1s, share, subscribe or refer this post to your friends. Keep visiting a Pinterest Boards containing unique resources of some key features of customizing E-commerce website.
Example of a feature to handle Gift Card and other related items on Ecommerce store, please pin it...!





Essentials of the Best Ecommerce Software and Website

The foundation of any online store starts with the selection of e-commerce software first. This software shapes every minute of the experience of your visitors that how it navigates to the Checkout section. For this reason, it is vital to choose the best ecommerce software for your business.
Best Ecommerce Software - A comparison
There are many e-commerce software to choose from, which is both good and bad for you. The good reason to select it means that you will find what you are looking for, and bad, because it is actually the numbers of ecommerce services company available with their software, which you need to compare. Fortunately, you do not need to compare all the available software to make sure your business gets a quality site - you just need to know what the most important features to look for.

Here are some important features to look for in e-commerce software.

Easy Installation of Items:
It starts with the shopping cart, the range of custom shopping carts and solutions are available on the web to virtually build your ecommerce website should include a simple payment options and other features such as image resizing, and viewing one item into multiple categories, which makes easy to setup an entire ecommerce store. Another interesting feature that some e-commerce software offers is the ability to import lists of your existing store in the new program. For example, Network Solutions offers software online shop that allows users to choose how they prefer to upload their shopping lists - from an existing store, or from an Excel spreadsheet.

Customizing capabilities:
To look the store uniquely yours, you should primarily focus on the area open for customization. The more customization means to have more choice to make the store exactly what you are looking for. After examining several software, one of the best we found is e-Smart eCommerce Suite as it offers the different modules and packages to choose according to your customizing need and budget, even it provides a complete customization, which allows you to design fully customized skins suite to your business style and store.

Managing Inventory and Order:
To handle payments, when the order has been placed by a customer – it should be recorded on the safe and secure place to further it uses for promotional mailing list or other order related inquiries. Storing and calculating all the information requires software or an application to manage all information accurately and within a standard format to export in excel for reporting and analyzing. Managing large no. of clients, one should opt for ecommerce software that offers variety of options such as storing credit card information and other details of customers no matter how many customers are. Further you make sure about the software to protect customers’ payment and other information if in case the site is hacked.

Shipping Calculator:
Good ecommerce software has the ability to not only calculate manage payments and taxes, but also the correct delivery and handling of the order. Ideally, you should be able to choose it from several ways to determine shipping. In addition, you may want to be able to offer customers the opportunity to choose between several different shipping options such as USPS, USPS Priority and UPS Ground.

Compatible Payment Gateway:
It is important for any successful online store today to have a way to accept credit cards on their own, but since the alternative payment options such as PayPal and Google Checkout are increasingly become popular, it is also important to offer these choices to your customers. PayPal and Google Checkout can guide you through setting up these options manually on your website, but the process is time consuming. Best Ecommerce Software should allow you to integrate these payment options quickly and easily. 

For example, e-Smart Ecommerce Suite, the e-commerce software supports more than a dozen different payment gateways to add and customize.

Conclusion:
It’s not about the ecommerce platform; it’s all about Ecommerce Software. Ultimately, it depends on the business and kind of products that the retailers is planning to get customers for. Within that specific criterion, they can decide, what will be best choice for them, an Ecommerce Platform e.g. Magento OR a Custom Ecommerce Software e.g. e-Smart eCommerce Suite?

e-Smart eCommerce Suite
Further we need your response to the above. Your input can help online retailers to minimize the time spending behind the selection of best Ecommerce Software and for us to enhance the capabilities of e-Smart eCommerce Suite!

How a Single Platform can Manage Multiple Ecommerce Stores

There are already big names in the online ecommerce industry offering multi store ecommerce services. Out of them e-Smart eCommerce Suite is one of the growing multiple stores management software.

Understanding a concept of multiple stores:
Now, it’s time to understand what actually the multi store concept is and how it manages different line of inventories in a single panel. Normally, a multi ecommerce stores are hosted on same platform but here the e-Smart eCommerce Suite is one that offers you to manage stores hosted on different platform – in simple words, if you own more than a single e-commerce stores that uses different storefronts or platforms – e.g. Yahoo Store, Amazon Webstore, eBay Storefront, Asp.Net or PHP, you can customize all according to your requirement and set up and manage all of them in Single panel that works as a Single independent platform. How it’s easy to say! In fact, it’s difficult to build such a technically advanced system or let’s say an ecommerce platform but we did it and successfully integrated all the major ecommerce features works behind the system to make it more powerful.

Multi Store Ecommerce
Multi-Store E-commerce Management
Why you need a platform for multiple stores management?
A strong and few of one reason why you need a multi stores ecommerce platform is the location and language that your business is operating from. If you’re potential customers based in different countries, and the product line is same, then you don’t need to manage a single product in all different stores, in other way, you can add same product in different store and as expected, each have an online presence of product details in a language, currency and measures particular to a country your store belongs to.

Multi Stores
Multiple Stores - Single Admin Panel - eSmart Ecommerce Suite

Finally, the multiple ecommerce software made for you is:
E-Smart Ecommerce Suite makes it easy to set up multiple stores that share the same or a set of inventory items, whether or not those stores are on the same platform or on different supported platforms. You can simply add a new store by a single click to Add store. Next, you can have an option to choose the ecommerce storefront or platform that each store uses and then you can decide a level of inventory that either you can use the same or shared inventory from other stores.

Whom to approach to get this ecommerce software and consultation:
Ydeveloper is a strong contender and is first in the custom ecommerce service provider. Their years of achievements and contributions to the ecommerce development encouraged them to design and develop a back-end ecommerce solution as mentioned above. Feel free to get a quote and advise on multiple ecommerce store management.

More on multi-store ecommerce:

7 Tips of Planning an Ecommerce Website before it Launches

There are so many options in today’s market that you don’t need to set off for building an ecommerce website.  As an alternative, take the time to consider the following factors before making your decision or finding a trustworthy partner for e-commerce solutions:

Pricing – Paying for the right

Cost matters, but be sure you know what you’re paying for before you sign on the spotted line.  For example, ask yourself the following questions:
  • Get an estimate of the customization of your ecommerce store, to find how much it does cost
  • Study the package or make sure about what items included in the ecommerce package you are going to acquire for ecommerce site development.
  • Depending on numbers of products and functionality, you should opt for right hosting services as it’s not expensive in some cases while it may when your site get traction.
Functionality – From where you need to start

Depending on your business model, there may be some cutting-edge ecommerce features that you completely must have in order to achieve something.  For example, if you look forward to selling products globally, you’ll need to hire an ecommerce site builder that allows you to manage payments from multiple countries.  On the other hand, if you plan to offer products that can be customized on multiple levels, you’ll need to devote in a system that manages this practice proficiently.

Click on image to know more about each feature....
Functionality of E-commerce Store
Look and Feel – Design an Ecommerce Site to Maximize Sales

Designing an e-commerce siteAs much as you might like to think that the quality of your products will overcome any weaknesses in your site’s design, you’ve got to face the harsh reality that most visitors only spend a few seconds on a new website before deciding whether to click the “Back” button or learn more about your business.  If your design isn’t up to snuff, your odds of retaining these visitors and converting them into buyers are pretty slim.


SEO – Optimize Your Ecommerce Site for Google Search

SEO for e-commerceSearch engine optimization is a essential part of building natural search engine traffic to your site, and the way your ecommerce store is well thought-out plays a big role in determining whether your site will be bring into being and prioritized by the search engines or whether you’ll be assessed penalties for things like duplicate content on your product pages. So, as to rank well and get found on search engine, contact a search engine specialist to build a powerful ecommerce SEO strategy that works.

Support – How good your customer services are

If this is your first ecommerce site, having good support is crucial, as you’re bound to run into at least a few issues during your launch.  The best ecommerce site builders provide 24/7 live support, email support, phone support and a ticket system, support through Twitter and other social media all of which help you to get answers to your questions as soon as possible.

Scaling – Not just for weight loss anymore

It’s not an overnight job that your shop gets high as compare to Amazon. It’s reasonable to think that initially we start with small and will grow gradually as people take more interest in your business, product or brand. Thus, the business grows; your website will be growing in all areas to give customers more valuable product and services. So, look around all the features and ecommerce solution that your website needs to get it updated with latest technology, functionality etc.

Testimonials – The final step

When analyzing ecommerce site providers, remember that it’s incredibly easy to put up a website and look professional.  Any teenager with a good computer and a few hours of free time can put up a page full of website templates and call it an ecommerce site builder, even if the support and features provided fall well short of what the true professionals in this industry offer.
Enhanced by Zemanta

What makes Hassle-free Online Buying Experience?


Online Shopping
More and more people connected and that leads to a rise in the activities performed in Internet chat, check emails, search destinations, online platforms to buy and sell, among others. Today the conventional deal takes place in a virtual environment where surfers connect from home or elsewhere via a smart phone, a tablet or other device with Internet access can make inquiries, purchases or sales through this channel. This is to the replacement of traditional shopping to the online shopping via ecommerce websites.

For those who have not yet entered into business on the Internet and want to have a good online shopping experience, and not have an idea of How to shop online, we leave the following recommendations for them to follow:

1) Recognized Site: If you're buying online, it is important to ensure that the site is recognized. The important thing is to have technology that meets all security requirements, which have as VeriSign or Truste certifications that show the proper use of safety data and users, etc.

2) Conditions of Sale: You may find some attractive Discounts and Coupons on the site for shopping. In this case, read the following conditions of sale before purchasing,
  • Read carefully the description of the product or service
  • Reviewing several similar notices from different vendors to find best deals and prices.
  • Read if the seller has guarantees and return policies.
  • Find out what are the means of payment accepted by the seller, if it offers financing, and who is responsible for shipping costs.
  • Pay special attention to products whose price is very low compared to other vendors.
  • Calculate the shipping time.
3) Seller Reputation/Review: Before buying, check out how other shoppers rated this vendor and how were their shopping experiences.

4) Safe Payments: One of the secrets of buying the Web is to use secure payment methods. You can make sure the online payment platforms about providing security for the buyer, financing and support under the Buyer Protection Program.

When to say online shopping is stress free?

Some benefits of electronic commerce have is that with power purchases from the comfort of home, at work or even while traveling from one point to another in the city.

Online buying experience
Here are some of the advantages of online shopping:

Shopping in short time: In a traditional shopping, you have to spend much time finding the gifts or items you want to purchase by walking through the malls, plazas and shops etc. The Online Shopping will give you more flexibility as you can make all purchase with a single click and also you can compare wide range of products at one place without visiting the different stores.

Payment facilities: Internet offers several payment options to suit your needs and times. Your payment can be cash, bank deposit or credit or debit card or even deferred months. If you wish to pay your purchase in cash, remember the seller agree on a crowded public place for the exchange. In case of a bank deposit, so do it in the name of the user or company to whom you're buying.

Effective Searching: Internet is much easier to find and compare a variety of products, only filtering by price or features, so the search can be customized and easily find the item you are looking for.

24 hours from the comfort of your home: No matter what time it is, you can surf the Internet and buy gifts for your loved ones and you can even do it from anywhere avoiding traffic and many other factors that complicate purchases only.
Enhanced by Zemanta

MCommerce as an alternative of Ecommerce

So far we have discussed several topics on E-commerce. Like, infographics screening history of electronic commerce, reviewed e-commerce storefronts, best practices on ecommerce – I and II, shopping cart as a heart of ecommerce, etc. Ecommerce has become a universal platform for small business today. In  anticipation of the introduction and growing use of smartphones, retailers have no other alternative for an ecommerce than this. But, thanks to Apple and other smartphones providers for providing new resources (MCommerce) to the retailers for marketing and selling their products and ideas through mobiles.

Let’s take an example of [hiding store name for privacy] – selling hair, cosmetics and beauty products online.

Total Visits from Mobile:

Total Visits by Mobile
Have you seen above screenshot?
Mobile Commerce
There are 298,135 visits acquired by different Mobile devices, which is almost 24% of total traffic acquired. Let’s compare other metrics, pages/visit, avg. visit duration, % new visits and bounce rate. Except bounce rate, the other metrics are almost same. It means that above engagement and consumers’ behavior confirms that people like to search, review and purchase products directly from their mobile. It is simple facts that countries have more Smartphone users have more insight and engagement in MCommerce and provide more scope of mobile application development for presenting their ideas through exciting mobile phone applications and utilities for better shopping experience. Here is a nice tool by Google to test your website that how it looks on a Smartphone. If you do not have enough budgets, you can use Google’s services to build a mobile site for free.

Let’s distribute above visits between Top 10 Mobile Devices as seen below:

Visits by Mobile Devices:
Visits by Mobile Devices
 Source: Google Analytics

Have you noticed bounce rates on above screenshots?
  • Visits via Personal Computers – 12,35,275 – Bounce Rate55.93%
  • Visits via Tablet, iPad – 100,696 – Bounce Rate – 57.63%
  • Visits via Mobile Device, iPhone – 110,899 – Bounce Rate – 69.51%
It’s clear that Mobile Device have more bounce visits than other devices and the reason could be size of the screen, so still it’s not an end of the era of traditional Ecommerce!

So, what else can be concluded from above facts and figures?
  • That people are using mobile for Shopping and it is growing eventually.
  • The technologies used in Mobile can do everything today that your personal computer can. 
  • You can go online and access any mobile friendly website and mobile apps directly.
  • You can also review product video and read review for any product before purchasing.
  • Comparisons shopping sites and social shopping search engines is giving you more options for products, pricing and other features to compare directly from your mobile.
  • Retailers have to adopt and keep eye on mobile technology for their business to grow.
  • Get more and quick response to the discounts, coupons and other offering available online.
  • Sharing and marketing QR code of your store in line with the product is a great idea.
  • Social networks – Facebook, Twitter, Google+ etc, have been more accessing on Mobile, build your profile in these networks to find potential customers and keep engaging with them.
That’s all from our side. Let’s provide your feedback on this topic.
Enhanced by Zemanta

Lift your store with Open Source Customization

You can navigate to sixth Para for Open Source Ecommerce; only if you are familiar with Ecommerce else you can continue with reading. Options are large enough to design and develop an Ecommerce Website. Since the evolution of an ecommerce, it has been mounting worldwide. In the beginning the platforms were very poor and it can not able to hold up to large products. It was look like a typical website. Ever-increasing its capability to handle large no. of products has opened numerous opportunities for small businesses across the globe. Countries like USA and UK lead top ecommerce businesses on the whole. It’s not only the reason that People from these countries prefer online shopping; it’s also about their contribution into the growth of e-Commerce.

Open Source Ecommerce Solutions
Website is the medium to go your business online. E-commerce is a sort of website that typically known as an online store or online shop or outlet. Generally retailers have no plan what platform has vital to build an ecommerce website; thus they have to consult a professional ecommerce website developer. An Ecommerce Consultant can give an advice to which platform go well with their business products to be sold on.

Depending on the products, you can decide an option to develop an e-commerce store for your business to bring into being.

We figured out the three ways and each has its own significance, features and benefits:
  • Storefronts (Yahoo Store, eBay Store Design, Amazon Webstore, etc.)
  • Programming Languages (Asp.Net, PHP and Java)
  • Open Source Platform (Magento Ecommerce, Zen Cart, osCommerce, etc.)
We are here to talk in more about Open Source Ecommerce Solutions. Click on Storefronts and Programming Languages for Ecommerce Development, to get an idea of what features and benefits they offer to you as well as to the customers. 

Ok, Ydeveloper has recently added a new page in Ydeveloper.com – it’s about Open Source Customization. If you do not know what it means, then it says free resources to design and develop an e-commerce outlet. Not to worry if you are not familiar with how a store can be managed. How shopping cart works, how inventory can be handled? These are all areas you can customize according to your requirement.

There are two benefits of using an open source platforms, first it saves time and money and next it is more cost effective.

Other benefits are as follows:
  • Solutions provide right to modify it
  • Integrate third party software and apps to make it more advance
  • Reduces development time and cost up to 40%
  • Technical support for maintenance and enhancement
  • Customizing templates
  • Availability of large pool of source code over the internet
When you search for list of best open source e-commerce platforms, you get confused. After a small research, you can’t come up with a solution that you can use for your business.

Find which platform best fits for each requirement as follows:
  • For CMS and Blogging – Drupal, Joomla and WordPress
  • For Shopping Cart Solution – X-Cart, AbleCommerce, Asp.Net Storefront
  • For Store Management – Zen Cart, osCommerce, Magento
  • For Web Application Framework – Ruby on Rails, CakePHP
  • For Forums – phpBB
Share your practical experience, if you have ever used anyone of an above open source eCommerce environment, about its use, flexibility, seo friendliness, etc.

Why f-commerce failed?


facebook commerce
The Facebook commerce is a great tool for marketing of your ecommerce or shopping store. F-Commerce is more popular as compared to the leading storefront providers, eBay Stores and Amazon Web store. Facebook is also an important part of social media optimization and marketing. It uses FBML language for designing and developing a store of your choice in Facebook. There are many Facebook applications for ecommerce available online that can be installed to get more engagements directly from your store using your Facebook friends.

Nearly 700 millions of people in Facebook itself and if you want your facebook store to be noticed, you should come up with a nice looking store design to Facebook.

After all having all such benefits, Can anyone miss the chance to have their own F-commerce store? Not at all! But, the fact is that it’s failed. Next couple of paragraph will give you some more idea on Facebook.

Facebook Store
Forced to give up their f-shops failing to have been able to generate the expected results, great names in US e-commerce industry have recently clashed with the vagaries of the new social wave that affects the online business. According to reports from Bloomberg, the first generation of signs to have tested the online shops directly incorporated with their fan pages have suffered a total flop.

A situation which, despite being the result of a first attempt, called social media analysts and consultants to review their forecasts regarding the future of f-commerce, and of course the failure.

This suggests that the difficulty to hang the network members have been mainly related to the approach used. Indeed, doing business on a social network, here in this case Facebook does is to reproduce the experiment as is proposed on its website. The social-commerce is not limited either to integrate its catalog to its fan page, that is to resolve to introduce a commercial approach within a social network, but to reflect on the real value added that contact point could be made.

An ill-conceived adaptation, due to a lack of experience and perspective in certain would be the cause of this essay almost stillborn for retailers concerned.

Especially, as Facebook has not really a gift for inspiring confidence with all the problems it generates about privacy of personal data. Not to mention the interface so far is not necessarily appropriate (banners, small space, time of relatively slow loading pages, etc.).

To date, the network seems especially appropriate as a medium for sales support, to talk about their products and benefit from the experiences of consumers.

Latest trend on "Facebook commerce" and "Facebook Store",


You can RT (Re-tweet) here,

Recommending Three Ecommerce Solutions for Online Retailers

Today, People have become busier in their personal as well as professional life. They have to consume some necessary products or services. Like, grocery, toothpaste, clothes are few examples of such products and services like medical, bill payments etc. They feel there are wastes of time to spend behind all these activities. I think Ecommerce Store is best solutions. Products or services you want to buy are just a few clicks away from you. Many ecommerce stores are offering free shipping and special discounts, which is in the benefit of both, online retailers and consumers and this is why many retailers are finding ecommerce website developer or ecommerce solution that ensures them having all features incorporated in their store. 

We have listed out 3 leading and best ecommerce solutions to opt for…

Multiple Ecommerce Store Managemente-Smart eCommerce Suite (Custom Ecommerce): You may have heard or not but, e-Smart eCommerce Suite is going to be one of the most powerful custom ecommerce solution. This is different in the sense that it offers a backend ecommerce solution to manage all your existing store activities using one single admin panel, where you can customized all the activities, functions of your multiple ecommerce stores according to your requirements. E.g. multiple shopping carts management at single panel, multiple inventories and order management system composited into to single panel with extensive reporting functionality. It comes with many more exciting features, click here to explore. This is much more flexible than any other ecommerce solution as it allows you to use this within ecommerce storefront features of your choice.

Magento Ecommerce SolutionMagento (Open Source): Magento is one of the most admired ecommerce solutions around. It is an extremely proficient open source solution which guarantees a highly interactive, dynamic, flexible and a user friendly website. It offers an user with the full control over the look, content and functionality of a website. Magento development is very consistent which enables online business to operate several online stores through a single administration panel. It’s capabilities to handle all the marketing activities have increased after it was acquired by the eBay.

OsCommerce Ecommerce SolutionOsCommerce (Open Source): This is one more great solution which powers more than 10,000 ecommerce sites around the world. This solution can be used on any web server which has PHP and MySQL installed on it. With the default installation, you can easily enable and configure the features on your own. It also allows you to set prices in different currencies and accepts all popular payment methods like PayPal, credit cards, checks etc. Some of the key features of osCommerce are unlimited products and categories support, shippable and downloadable products support etc.

These are the top 3 ecommerce solutions available in the market. You can select any of these based on your website's requirements. Analyze your business requirements and website to find out which ecommerce solution will work well for your site and business.

How to find a right Ecommerce Development Company


Finding an ecommerce development company that offers a reliable and best ecommerce solution is the difficult process to perform by an individual or a retailer. They can use some online resources like search engine by typing a queries like “custom ecommerce development”, “ecommerce development company” etc. Does this solve your problem? In both cases, if it is yes – means you find an ecommerce company of your need or if it is no, then you are also interested to know about the main reasons of not finding the choice of your company.  We determined some areas that perfectly fit in the category of reliable and quality ecommerce solutions.
Suite of Success:
Many ecommerce development companies are offering comprehensive solutions in terms of managing all the ecommerce activities behind the screen – a backend solution. This helps you to customize your current ecommerce store to make it more advanced and flexible. E.g. e-Smart eCommerce Suite can be considered as a suite of Success. 

Designing an Ecommerce Website:
designing an ecommerce site
Designing a high-quality ecommerce website means to get a perfect ecommerce solutions and make sure that your existence on web is visible and also your clientele are served in a better way. The ecommerce website designed by the ecommerce web developers of a web development company offer increase to competent company management as well as insert value to the sales page and also providers. There are many companies in the region of the globe that have capability in creating personalized internet based software and applications. The method is to determine the right ecommerce application development company.

Portfolio of Ecommerce Application Development:
To start on, you have to take into account if the ecommerce developer you are going to select could help you accomplish your requirements and you ensure him a right sort of an ecommerce developer. You can review their ecommerce application development projects portfolio.

Partnership that built Long Run Business Growth:
Ok, you reviewed their portfolio, now what? The next step is to find how much they are reliable as you have to build a long run partnership with that custom software development agency and you are always in a need of improvement in the area in terms of technological upgrades. How it help to your web and other development process if you get a strong partner,
  • It makes you keep updated with the latest technological development
  • Provide you a competitive advantage
  • Provide a space that help you in focusing your core goals
You can also take advantages of other areas like Mobile Application Development, Search Marketing Services etc. that an application development company you have chooses have expertise in.

Business Values:
You have to be known with the company offering web application development services in a wide that you are going to employ for your business growth. Some web design companies confer interest to mass creation of websites. Such types of agencies typically are surely not thinking about everlasting company relationships.

Coding Standards:
Whether it will be a custom ecommerce development or web development process, you need to make sure the coding standards and framework that the company is going to follows. It will be latest and a developer can easily customized and work on that.

Other areas to concern:
These are just a small number of significant points you must give attention to while hiring a web application developer or a company. With the exception of them you have to verify company’s monetary strength, number of years that the company has been in business, their business standards and experience in quality software programming, development, designing, and usability and search engine marketing.

Create Customized Dashboard for your Ecommerce Store

Ecommerce Stores can be varied by the platform it uses. Not all platforms have same features, functionality and tools, particularly when you are using Yahoo Store, eBay Store, Amazon Web-store or other storefronts. The activities on your store depend on what you are selling online. Sometime you believe ecommerce storefronts are best ecommerce solution, but on the other hand they have some limited features. 

Let’s take an example of ecommerce shopping cart – it generally provides the details of product pricing, tax, shipping, and the payment gateways. What else people are looking for? Cross selling is a feature that offers a list of related products that suggest your prospective buyers to look at other products from same store and have almost same criteria.

Cross Selling - See the section below "Other items you might want to order":

This is an example of how you can customize your existing shopping cart to offer it something more. Inventory and order management are other areas that can be also effectively designed to provide more efficiency. So, combining all these enhanced features to a single dashboard will help you manage all your ecommerce activities according your requirements. The customized dashboard is enough to manage all activities that concern with inventory, order, customer services, content, product, payment, shipping, marketing, SEO of your store etc. You can still continue with your existing storefront services as this is only a dashboard of your choice. This required expertise, first in the storefront design and development and secondly custom ecommerce development.

There is least number of such ecommerce solution providers in USA, e-Smart eCommerce Suite (at Ydeveloper.com) is one of them. It’s a comprehensive backend ecommerce storefront solution.

This article better explains you Why e-Smart eCommerce Suite is a profitable ecommerce solution? e-Smart eCommerce Suite has been designed keeping in mind all an above customizing requirements by store owners to their customers.

Before moving its advantage section, let’s look at more features of a customized dashboard,
  • Customize Revenue Graph with Tax, Shipping & Quantities
  • Best Sellers
  • Low Inventory Products
  • Most Views Products
  • Recent Viewed Products
  • Easy Modules Navigation
  • Latest Order
  • Recent Added Products
  • Recent Customers
  • Top Customers
  • Recent Search by Customers
This suite mainly comply with all the following areas of customization,
  • Managing inventories
  • Managing orders
  • Product feed or shopping feed management
  • RMA application – a customer refund  management tool
  • Improved Navigation
  • Enhance customer experience
Here are the exclusive benefits:
  • A single admin panel to manage all store activities
  • Custom solution for all your business process and other requirements
  • High end solution for inventory management
  • Custom-built shopping cart, checkout process, and order processing
  • Customized reports to understand and analyzed your business performance
  • A complete SEO friendly environment
  • Managing multiple shipping addresses per order
  • Providing multiple real-time shipping rates per order
  • Supporting multiple currencies and languages
  • Generating feeds for various ecommerce storefronts, e.g. Yahoo Store, eBay Store etc.
  • Generating feeds for comparison shopping search engines – Goggle shopping, Price Grabber, Yahoo Shopping and more
The customizing your ecommerce store could be a great experience for a long run. Tell your friends if they are in online retailing business and want to re-build his/her store enabled with advanced features all the way through custom ecommerce solution.


What else you expect that needs to be included here?

Difference in Google Search Results with and without logged in

To stay myself updated with latest technological upgrades in Ecommerce, I was looking for top ecommerce blogs to get it subscribed via email or other way. To do this, I go for search into the Google.com using Firefox web browser. Search box of Google was waiting for me to put a query. Therefore, I entered “top ten ecommerce blogs” and click to search for a result; I was surprised with the results I found. Can someone guess why I was surprised?
No? Not?

Surprisingly, my blog on ecommerce was on 4th place. I did same process again to find list of top ten ecommerce blogs; there was no change in the search results. When I tried Google.com using Google Chrome for a same search query, I did not found my blog in the first 10 results whereas it was found on 4th when I used Firefox. This difference confused me a lot. It might be an issue with web browsers. So, I cleared cookies for a while in both of the web browsers and I did same process again in Firefox and chrome. This time, I could not find my blog in first ten results and both browsers had same results on “top ten ecommerce blogs”.

Do you know why? I find, logged into Google account was the main reason of this difference, which I had never noticed before and automatically logged out after clearing the Firefox cookies.

Now, the question is why this difference was there. Why a logged in user can’t see a normal Google search results?

The answer is the effect of personalized search / social search / search plus your world (SPYW)! These results are based on what you and the people in your circles have shared, commented and +1’d in Google+ stream.

Here, I can see my blog on 4th place, which was originally posted in Google+ stream of Ecommerce Blog and I shared it on Ydeveloper’s Google+ stream. Please take a note; I was logged in with Ydeveloper’s Google+ account while searching for a “top ten ecommerce blogs”.


With and Without logged in Search Result comparison:


Google search results on “top ten ecommerce blogs” with logged in:

Google search results on “top ten ecommerce blogs” without logged in:


Are you in favor of these personalized search results or still, you loving the normal search results.
Please share your views on this topic via comment.

Tips for Creating an Attractive and Productive Ecommerce Site

Creating an Ecommerce website, is a completely different process from a regular website. In terms of design, each has different looks and style. Ecommerce site is a catalog of products offering by an online merchant or a retailer, which includes the option of paying online via various payment gateways. This is why it requires some more efforts to design an Ecommerce website.

Here are some tips to create an attractive, useful and more productive ecommerce site,

Unique Product line:
Obviously, if you want to create an ecommerce website means that you want to sell something online. Therefore, before starting with the site, you must choose the product you are selling. The design and layout of your site depends on the product or service you sell. Usually, there are many products for sale through e-commerce. However, you should choose a particular product to sell so that your site could well know for a single product market and attract more customers through your site Web.

Qualified Model:
You can get many models for building an ecommerce website over the Internet free of charge. However, be careful while choosing models for developing an ecommerce site. The template you choose should be in line with the product or services you are offering. If you sell formal wear and using a model for funky wear, then it is not in the line with the product you are selling. Never use heavy graphics and images that are otherwise negative aspect of your site, as large images take longer to load.

Flexible Shopping Cart Software:
Cart is part of your ecommerce site that contains the record of each order placed by customer. Whatever your customer will purchase, the list of items with the total amount and tax will be calculated by the shopping cart. Thus, it should be visible on every page of your ecommerce website. It becomes more convenient to shop online with the help of your cart.

Secured and Easy Payment Process:
If your site looks very attractive with eye catching banners and product images but, you do not have a reliable and easy payment processing and gateways, your site will be overlooked and may be considered unproductive. It has been recommended to use different payment gateways on your ecommerce site like Visa, PayPal etc.

Monitoring:
It is also an important factor for the success of your ecommerce site. You should know all the time on the responses and reviews of customers on your products and services including the comments and suggestion given by the customer in part of website or blog. Based on suggestion, you can improve your site and maintain it to give your site more attractive and unique look.