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Ecommerce Web Development Process begins with Planning

Posted by Unknown April 30, 2013 1 comment
The ecommerce web development process does not always follow specific steps and stiff, as each project has its own peculiarities and we must acclimatize to them consequently.
Ecommerce Web Development Process
Ecommerce Website Development Process
Here we aren't covering the type of shopping carts, no. of payment gateways, and use of shipping methods, you may go for. This is actually a back-end database driven process that runs after integrating these system to front-end, a design made by html, css etc.

Despite making the things easier, we can say that there are some steps already defined. In general, it can be useful if you keep on building any website.

Let's see them in details:

Planning:
To begin you must decide what target audience the website is looking for. This is vital, because the designs and contents depend on this. You may have some questions that we can answer before starts planning, There are…Is ecommerce website targeted for children or adults? Do you access the public Internet from work, from school or from home? How fast is your Internet connection? Do they want to be informed or entertained? Be sure to answer these questions from the start for your website.

Website Architecture:
The website should be well structured, both for the benefit of visitors and for easy maintenance. Plan the website on a slat or schematic, flow diagram type. In this step, you are going to make a map of the site and the ecommerce development agenda.

Do not forget that you should plan website to make a change so that it doesn’t look so simple since most of the websites are constantly changing and well planned website simplifies this process.

Graphic Design:
In this step with the information already collected in the previous steps you design the look of the website, it is important not to confuse the graphic design for web sites that used to print and other areas because of technical limitations (and opportunities) web pages are foreign to most designers trained in other media. The file size requirements, limitations of color and screen resolutions are very different from those that are printed. This is front-end areas and will be designed nicely to encourage more visitors.

Website Programming:
In this way the project has been well defined and the ecommerce graphic design process already completed. Now the application program and the database to join it with the design of the interface as defined previously. This is something like back-end programs that manages your website behind the screen.

Quality control:
All web design professional should have this step in the process, is very important to test the website application exclusively designed to make sure that no errors. The website should be passed through all the web testing process.

Hosting and maintenance:
This step often depends on the type of project, but for a complete project you choose a good hosting provider that includes the ultimate in speed and stability, e.g. Unix / FreeBSD, PHP, Apache, and MySQL. 
Every website needs constant maintenance. Do not make the mistake of assuming that once you are online, everything is already done. If you want people to return to your site, you must add new material to your website, email to respond, and maybe links to update usage statistics that follow. For a small site, this can take a while as little as two or three hours a month.

Maintaining a large site can be a full time job, so you have to consider the cost of constant maintenance within your budget. Working with the same people ensures consistency, a new company or person not have the same working knowledge of your website, so keep satisfying your returning visitors.

I hope this will be useful; we are also consulting on Yahoo Store design and development with a user centric approach mainly focusing usability and information architecture.

Ecommerce in 2013: Selling More with New Tech and Device

Posted by Unknown April 2, 2013 0 comments
Don't look back in 2012 for ecommerce, it is set to grow exponentially in 2013, what with the advent of mobile devices that make online shopping instant, fun, and too easy. Your regular site is also all set to reap the benefits of the new technology that helps you sell more from your e-commerce store.

What technology can ecommerce business owners turn into the best shopping experience for their customers?

Here are few technologies you should invest in for achieving your objectives in 2013:

Advanced Search: The technology that makes available millions of search results at the click of a button was already available. Now you need technology that presents a comprehensive list of product names as well as related products right there in the drop down suggestions from the search box. Your search box can offer thumbnail images, categories, product details, and pricing in the description for each result. Help your customer shop easily with advanced search capabilities.

Field Validation in the Checkout Form: Imagine a customer’s frustration when he/she must fill out all the fields in the checkout form all over again because one of the fields could not be validated. Validation capabilities integrated into the form itself will simply alert the user to fields that could not be validated. The user can just fill in appropriate information and proceed through checkout. No need to fill in the details all over again, no matter how few fields are used.

Real-time Inventory: Customers are also frustrated when they reach the product page and find that the color, model, or size of the product they want is not available. To prevent such a situation, the products pages themselves can carry information on the exact items available in the store. You can even provide an idea about when the out-of-stock products will be available.

Product Videos: There are plenty of ecommerce features to communicate the look and feel of your products to your customer. Product zoom and animation are some of the other such features. But they are no match for short videos on the product page that can be re-sized to fit the screen. Short videos will load fast and convey an accurate idea of the product to the shopper.

As the year progresses, we are likely to see a plethora of new features introduced for e-commerce stores. It is important to keep tabs on new features offered by ecommerce development services providers. Keep your eyes peeled and your e-commerce store updated with the latest and best features for your customers. It will prove to be a worthy investment. 

Watch space for more in-store features....

Multi-Store Ecommerce Platform: An Advanced Solution for Webstores Management

Posted by Unknown March 1, 2013 1 comment
Managing multiple storefronts (including Yahoo store, Amazon store, eBay storefront, and ASP.Net or PHP ecommerce stores) is a tough task. It is made simple by a multi-store ecommerce platform that enables the business owner or his admin to manage all the stores from a single dashboard.

Of course, it is not easy to build a multi-store ecommerce platform. It is a highly advanced system and requires great investment in terms of both time and quality development inputs to ensure that it functions exactly as required.
e-Smart Ecommerce Suite

e-Smart eCommerce Suite from Ydeveloper is an example of a brilliant multi-store ecommerce platform that enables you to manage all your different stores using just a single database and a single dashboard. The dashboard makes it easy as a breeze to manage your stores. There is a high degree of flexibility in inter-store management that can be effected right from the single-panel dashboard.

Specific Instances when a Best Multi Store Ecommerce Platform is Most Useful:

If you have customers based in different countries but your product line is the same, you have the capability to manage a product in all of your stores. If you make changes to the pricing of the product from the admin panel, that change is reflected in all the other stores. Every store can offer product details in the language of the country it caters to.

  • You can set up multiple stores that share the same or a set of inventory items, even if those other stores are on the same platform or on different supported platforms. Just add a new store with a single click on the ‘Add Store’ button in the panel.
  • You can assign the ecommerce storefront or platform that each store uses. You can also configure a level of inventory or set one from the other stores.
  • Each store you build can have a separate domain name. Your stores can have either overlapping sets of keywords with a common thread running through or entirely diverse sets of keywords for each store. Hence, a multi-store ecommerce platform brings some great advantages from the perspective of search engine optimization (SEO).
  • Your multiple stores will also enable you to create and manage pages, accounts, and inclusions on multiple social networking sites. Your blogs, YouTube content, and other marketing messages can be far better distributed and manageable. Reaching customers will also therefore be less of a challenge with a suitable multi-store ecommerce platform.
What’s more, these are only some of the very many advantages of sourcing a multi-store ecommerce platform from highly capable vendors such as Ydeveloper. The multi-store management software takes the drudgery out of your daily tasks and helps you manage your ecommerce stores in the exact ways you want to. With SEO advantages flowing automatically from such a setup, multi-store ecommerce is on its way to becoming the next big thing.

Multi Store Ecommerce: Some Apparent Benefits

Posted by Unknown February 13, 2013 1 comment
What comes to the mind when you think of benefits for the store owner who opts for multi store ecommerce? Also, why opt for multiple ecommerce stores, in the first place?

Each store is a site in itself, though all are unified at the backend. These are great for the links they generate for each other and collectively. Mere links are no longer important, but one can guess that good links at the right places do matter, if only for the advertising.


Beyond the apparent benefits of employing a single backend for multiple e-commerce stores, a store owner must also have a provider that is sensitive to all and any of the online multi shop requirements, in terms of design and development issues that might sometimes surface. Good after-sales service providers can ensure that your multistore ecommerce site is not only effectively set up but also continues running smoothly thereafter. Some service providers who develop and maintain your ecommerce multi store will also help out with the optimization.

Promoting all your stores is plenty of hard work. Service providers with offshore development center maintain staff to optimize your ecommerce stores. Store owners find it pretty convenient to shift a product to another store when it is no longer available in the former. This also keeps each storefront fresh, with an ever-present scope to keep it that way. A single-panel admin software makes this and such processes a cinch. The more online stores you maintain, the greater chance you stand for maintaining or enhancing your multiple stores names or  the names of your products on search engines. 
It is highly tempting to have all stores¹ pages look more or less similar. But don¹t forget to make space for differentiation. Begin the listing process with a tab on the images and content you use on the multiple stores. If possible, use exclusive content and images for each store, so as to have the added benefit of optimization. 

Your multi-store is your baby, your concept, and your future. Take good care of it.

Yahoo Store Web Development for Better Ecommerce Business

Posted by Unknown February 1, 2013 0 comments
Successful identification of just the most perfect Yahoo store development service provider is critically important. It is easy to get a hold on a developer your store can do without.

Benefits that accrue off a Yahoo Store are very popular with midsize and small businesses. Yahoo store is a powerful channel for ecommerce business, and Yahoo store development is the instrument that enables you to carve just such a channel.

A Yahoo store integrates tons of functionality and makes your ecommerce presence come alive. It even enables taking your business to the next levels in systematic and easy steps. Your Yahoo store is a perfect channel to make the most of the online opportunity for business. 

To realize the business targets you have set for yourself, it is important to devise innovative ways to achieve it. Providing value is more important than everything else, in the final analysis. In the case of a Yahoo store, development services can be used to ensure you have all the right tools to help you on your way to business success. 

Yahoo store web development provides all the functionality that a store owner may require to be able to take his business to the higher levels. Yahoo store design helps business owners reach a wider target audience through which a proactive relationship with the prospective and existing customers may be established. That, in turn, will suitably guide all business policies and processes.

Yahoo store design is considered a perfect gateway for a wide majority of virtual stores. Your store can achieve greater visibility and better sales with Yahoo store development. Customization provides the opportunity to build a store to your customers' liking. Such development also provides for the Yahoo store owner all the tools required to attract prospective customers. Several Yahoo Store developers offer a customized Yahoo Store development service to deliver the best results for all the businesses that rely on their Yahoo store for business development. 

If you are on the lookout for a Yahoo store developer, you need to first search for a reliable source through which you could hire the developers. Such a source can be a firm that offers Yahoo store development services and solutions. The web development professionals at such an organization are seasoned developers who are fully aware of the kind of features your Yahoo store will require. It pays to secure the services of such a professional setup since they have all the resources necessary to do full justice to your Yahoo store. Yahoo store developers with good experience and high credentials can identify the appropriate technical intricacies that need to be focused on. Such meticulous attention to your Yahoo store ensures smooth functioning of the website.

Successful identification of just the most perfect Yahoo store development service provider is critically important. It is easy to get a hold on a developer your store can do without. Look for a strong portfolio and do your own cross-checking before you settle for a Yahoo store development pro. 

When your Yahoo store is developed by just the right kind of a provider, it has every chance of making it big in the humongous world of ecommerce. It pays to invest time in researching for just the right kind of a Yahoo store development services provider.

5 Ecommerce Website Designing and Marketing Trends to Follow in 2013

Posted by Unknown December 13, 2012 1 comment
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

Posted by Unknown November 26, 2012 1 comment
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

Posted by Unknown October 19, 2012 0 comments
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

Posted by Unknown August 23, 2012 0 comments
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

Posted by Unknown August 8, 2012 1 comment
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.

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