Online Stores - Shopping Carts

Simple advice. Use a well known shopping cart and don't pay too much.

People like consistency across their online buying experience. If you are using a store format that is familiar then you sell more because it is trusted and easy to understand and navigate. Trust and understandable navigation are the two big bugbears of online commerce.

From a sales perspective, if your online store can cross-sell, upsell and bump and get you to the checkout in the fewest moves, then that's all you really need. Extras like newletters, email notifications, blogs and running a customer account are all included in the OpenSource stores like ZenCart and osCommerce.

A good shopping cart is an expensive piece of software to develop. Don't re-invent the wheel. You don't need to spend thousands of dollars on a store when there are really excellent, free online stores like Zencart and osCommerce. These can easily be modified to match the look and feel of your main site.

I've seen $10,000 bespoke online stores that have been modified from osCommerce and Zencart without the purchaser being aware.

osCommerce

osCommerce is an online store solution that contains both a catalog front end and an administration tool back end which are easily set up. It does take some technical knowledge to get it to match the look and feel of your main website, but we regularly install, modify, load products and get stores live in less than a day.

osCommerce has been largely sponsored by PayPal in recent years so it is no surprise that it dovetails easily with all of the PayPal payment solutions.

osCommerce supports the following payment gateways.

Administration / Backend Functionality

• Supports unlimited products and categories
  • Products-to-categories structure
  • Categories-to-categories structure
• Add/Edit/Remove categories, products, manufacturers, customers, and reviews
• Support for physical (shippable) and virtual (downloadable) products
• Administration area secured with a username and password defined during installation
• Contact customers directly via email or newsletters
• Easily backup and restore the database
• Print invoices and packaging lists from the order screen
• Statistics for products and customers
• Multilingual support
• Multicurrency support
  • Automatically update currency exchange rates
• Select what to display, and in what order, in the product listing page
• Support for static and dynamic banners with full statistics

Customer / Frontend Functionality

• All orders stored in the database for fast and efficient retrieval
• Customers can view their order history and order statuses
• Customers can maintain their accounts
  • Addressbook for multiple shipping and billing addresses
• Temporary shopping cart for guests and permanent shopping cart for customers
• Fast and friendly quick search and advanced search features
• Product reviews for an interactive shopping experience
• Forseen checkout procedure
• Secure transactions with SSL
• Number of products in each category can be shown or hidden
• Global and per-category bestseller lists
• Display what other customers have ordered with the current product shown
• Breadcrumb trail for easy site navigation

Product Functionality

• Dynamic product attributes relationship
• HTML based product descriptions
• Automated display of specials
• Control if out of stock products can still be shown and are available for purchase
• Customers can subscribe to products to receive related emails/newsletters

Payment Functionality

• Accept numerous offline payment processing (cheque, money orders, offline credit care processing, ..)
• Accept numerous online payment processing (PayPal, 2CheckOut, Authorize.net, iPayment, ..)
• Disable certain payment services based on a zone basis

Shipping Functionality

• Weight, price, and destination based shipping modules
• Real-time quotes available (UPS, USPS, FedEx, ..)
• Free shipping based on amount and destination
• Disable certain shipping services based on a zone basis

Tax Functionality

• Flexible tax implementation on a state and country basis
• Set different tax rates for different products
• Charge tax on shipping on a per shipping service basis

Fully Installed osCommerce Online Store

Basic Package - $450

1. Free hosting for 1 year
2. Domain name registration
3. osCommerce installation
4. Look and feel adapted to your company logo, header and footer graphics.
5. Product categories, currency, basic shipping and tax information entered.
6. Basic ten products loaded.
7. Welcome screen written

You need to supply photos, product descriptions, company logo and basic graphics and ensure you have your payment gateway set up. Be aware that it can take some weeks to verify bank details with payment gateways like PayPal. If you need any help or advice in doing this then do not hesitate to contact us.

Intermediate Package - $650

Same as the basic package but we also design your logo and the basic (header/footer) site graphics.

Advanced packages - $750+

Contact us for a quote. You may have a large number of products or need specific look and feel changes. We can do flash video but would strongly recommend against this. All the research says that flash heavy sites don't sell. They win awards but annoy customers.

ZenCart

Payment Gateways

Categories and Products

• unlimited category depth
• physical merchandise
• downloadable virtual products
• products can reside in multiple categories
• product options as dropdowns, radio buttons, checkboxes, and text input

Promotions, Sales and Discounts

• individual special prices
• global sale reductions
• category-wide sale prices
• discount coupons
• customer group discounts
• quantity discounts
• one-time charges
• minimum and maximum purchases per product
• prices by attributes

Customer Retention Tools

• periodic newsletter in plain text or HTML
• order status emails and records in the customer account
• referral tools
• gift certificates

Administration Back End

• configure your minimum and maximum values, image sizes and customer details
• choose which layout settings to use for the spotlight listings
• pick which details to show on your product details page
• edit your policies pages with HTML (if desired)
• add, delete, move, link or copy your products
• create and manage your product attributes
• manage product reviews, featured products, specials and storewide sales
• shipping and payment module installation and management
• price and taxation control
• banner advertising controls
• newsletter creation and sending
• content management tool, easily add new content pages

Fully Installed ZenCart Online Store

Basic Package - $550

1. Free hosting for 1 year
2. Domain name registration
3. ZenCart installation
4. Look and feel adapted to your company logo, header and footer graphics.
5. Product categories, currency, basic shipping and tax information entered.
6. Basic ten products loaded.
7. Welcome screen written

You need to supply photos, product descriptions, company logo and basic graphics and ensure you have your payment gateway set up. Be aware that it can take some weeks to verify bank details with payment gateways like PayPal. If you need any help or advice in doing this then do not hesitate to contact us.

Intermediate Package - $750

Same as the basic package but we also design your logo and the basic (header/footer) site graphics.

Advanced packages - $850+

Contact us for a quote. You may have a large number of products or need specific look and feel changes. We can do flash video but would strongly recommend against this. All the research says that flash heavy sites don't sell. They win awards but annoy customers.