Multichannel E-Commerce and The Issues Involved

Ecommerce is no more an alternative. It has grown to become ‘the’ thing for those in the retail sector. In fact, normal store business has become a second option for many businesses that are actively looking at furthering their customer base in the ecommerce sector. But still, the gross B2B revenue is hardly a tenth of the total B2B revenue volume. 

 

Now, what does this mean? This means that while the sector continues to experience high growth, the potential for B2B growth in the online space is extremely high. This has to be seen in the backdrop of the huge rose in demand for mobile devices. The surge for the mobile has in turn, pushed B2B ecommerce prospects further up. 

 

What does a multichannel ecommerce website give you?

A multichannel or a cross channel ecommerce platform gives you the opportunity to sell your products and services not just in one channel, but in every available channel. In effect, you’re having multiple ecommerce websites while you have only one in reality. Inventory management, sales orders, customer details, payment integration are all integrated in one centralised location.

This brings us to our first problem: Database systems and process integration. Now the backend of your ecommerce website includes the modules like order to cash, inventory management, supply chain, finance and payment integration. Now, to make all these available in all channels such as Amazon, ebay, or even the traditional MOTO or EPOS is quite a difficult task. This calls for an expert ecommerce architect and developer (or a team of developers). Do you have one?

The second issue is Content. No matter what mode of ecommerce you are in, the consumer looks for quality content. It is based on the description of a product that a customer selects it. And you need to ensure that your content is not needlessly elaborate while at the same time not missing out on any essential details. Try to keep your content as crisp as possible as users will most probably log in to your website through their mobiles.

The third issue is the paucity of expertise in digital marketing. Today, if any business wants to be a step ahead of its rivals, it needs to make a success out of its digital marketing campaign. But lack of experts contributes to a dearth of knowledge here. A B2B ecommerce platform will greatly help address the paucity of expertise in digital marketing by spawning research and new methods that help businesses increase their foothold in their respective spaces.

Why Magento Continues to Dominate?

Today’s customers expect nothing short of a complete website experience when they enter an ecommerce website. Ecommerce has diversified greatly in the last few years. It started as a sector that catered to the online buying and selling of particular niche products in the market. But over a period of time, as users began to see the inherent advantages of buying products without having to move out of their comfort zones (along with increased competition leading to lowering prices), the ecommerce scene began to explode.

 The Specifics Behind its Eminence

Even in this highly competitive environment, one platform continues to dominate the scene. Yes, that is Magento. As we mentioned in the beginning of the article, customers are looking at websites that satisfy all their expectations. That means delivery on security, user-centric design, ease of use, hybrid functionality and overall user experience. 

 

While other platforms perform exceedingly well on some of these parameters, Magento delivers on all these fronts and that is the reason for its continued success in the ecommerce scene.

Easier Customization

One of the principal advantages with Magento is that it provides for easier customization than its competitors. With a large number of extensions, you get to truly customize your ecommerce website according to your business requirements. 

 

It is the look and feel of your website that first attracts the user. And what decides this look and feel? It is your design. Now, add hassle-free theme design and integration in Magento’s list and you get to see why it remains attractive. 

 

Easier Payment Gateway and Social Media Integration

The best and most profitable way of promoting your website or attracting visitors to your website today, is to drive social media promotions. And Magento does this wonderfully through its integration with different social media platforms like Google+, facebook, twitter, linkedin etc.

And speaking of payment gateways, this is the most important part of your ecommerce website, one that decides whether customers are just going to visit your website or are they really going to make a purchase there. And, Magento makes the job much simpler with its payment customization standing out for its simplicity and ease of integration.

What we’ve mentioned here are just some of the advantages that go into making Magento the numero uno platform in ecommerce. For more on Magento and how it compares vis-a-vis the rest in its field, watch this space!

Exciting and Effective Magento Extensions

If you are one of those ecommerce merchants who never tire of adding features and exciting functionality to your ecommerce website, this piece is for you. Now you must be knowing what modules are. They are a bunch of XML and PHP files that allow the system to extend its functionality apart from its defined core functions.

Over the past few years, Magento has emerged as one of the leading ecommerce solutions that is constantly pushing the boundaries of innovation by coming up with new tricks and extensions every now and then. This article looks at some of the exciting Magento extensions from the Magento Community Edition and Enterprise edition.

6 Great Magento Extensions That You Should Know 

Better Store Search : It is found that about 70 percent of shoppers say that store search plays an important role in shopping cart development. When that is the case, a good site search is extremely important and this extension provides you precisely that with plenty of search control.

Udropship : Drop shipping is an ecommerce store’s inventory expansion key. In other words, include items that might otherwise be too expensive when shipped to a warehouse only to be shipped again to a customer.

GoMage Light Checkout : This is one of the fastest and most efficient extensions you can find for your checkout. While it brings all the web pages to one single page, all it requires is that customers can simply click “add to Cart” and instantly move on to the checkout page. So you can tell yourself, No more repeated clicks and wasting time”

Sweet Tooth : One of the best extension appreciated by online merchants as it supports loyalty points and rewards for customers who buy products consistently. This ecommerce solution thoroughly integrates and has been shown boost sales.

FishPig’s WordPress Integration : WordPress is among the best open source blogging and content management systems on the market and this extension seamlessly integrates into Magento.

AvaTax : across the U.S new tax laws in jurisdictions can greatly complicate your sales tax collection. Using AvaTax extension will help you easily integrate with the core Magento functionality. Despite the fact that this extension is free, it does require software-as-a-service (SaaS) solution.

A Brief Look at Magento, X-Cart and OsCommerce

There are a plethora of ecommerce platforms that colour the ecommerce market today. But, which one you choose could well determine the prospects of your business five or ten years from now. Whatever may be the differences of opinion on other issues, there can be no disagreement that Magento, Oscommerce and X-cart are the 3 leading ecommerce platforms of the day. This article looks at their features and advantages briefly.

Magento

 Magento is the undisputed leader of the shopping cart market in the world today. It is an Open Source shopping cart that provides you, the user with enormous flexibility and control over the look and feel, content and functionality of the store. The other major advantage of Magento is that it is extremely feature-rich. Some of its top features are:

1. It provides you with targeted promotion and merchandising

2. You get product suggestion tools, with ratings and reviews

3. It provides you with useful customer segmentation

4. Search engine optimization

5. Multiple payment and shipping options among others

X-Cart

Second to none, this is an ecommerce platform based on PHP smarty templates. Feature-rich, secure and flexible, it actually combines all the characteristics that you look for in an ecommerce platform pretty neatly. If you’re looking to build a multi-functionality ecommerce website with lot of products on offer and huge user traffic, you should seriously consider X-Cart. Let’s look at its top features:

1. Highly customizable, flexible and scalable ecommerce platform

2. Multiple product and multiple language support with maximum flexibility

3. Complete integration with all major payment gateways

4. Fully search engine friendly which improves your visibility greatly.

OsCommerce

If you need a platform that offers you multiple functionalities but still can be setup quickly with considerable ease, then you must go for Oscommerce. Your web server needs to support PHP and MySQL to run Oscommerce. Some of its features that stand out are:

1. Broadened customization with an OS that is easy to administer

2. One of the best ecommerce platforms with extensible multilingual functionality

3. Minimal risk of corruption of files as all content is stored as reference files in text format

4. Made for mobile, with product comparison features and multiple currency support embedded

The Key Security Essentials For E-commerce Websites

Ecommerce security is one of the most important topics being discussed by programmers and business owners alike. Now as a business, you would definitely want your ecommerce website to be as secure and integrated as possible. But what is the modus operandi that you would adopt to make it happen? This question assumes all the more importance given the fact that cyber warfare and threats are increasing in their complexity and efficacy almost every day.

A great example of this is the latest security vulnerability of ecommerce websites that is being exploited by all and sundry, the ‘Poodle’. This is an SSL3 vulnerability that only requires you to disable SSL3 both on the client side and the server side. So, what is the way out? 

• Ensure SSL and PCI certification
   

If you’re a business owner, make sure that the solution that your service provider gives you has SSL encryption. The SSL (Secure sockets layer) encryption is a must if you want to ensure a secure communication channel between client and server. 

 

If it’s a payment portal or gateway, then a PCI-DSS (Payment card industry data security standard) certification is a must. Trusted solution providers will generally only provide solutions that are PCI-DSS certified as they know users won’t even look at making payments otherwise.

• Store only the customer data required 
   

Most payment websites today offer what is called the Storecard feature where the website’s database stores the customer’s card details, wanting the customer to enter nothing other than his CVV and password. But this also has a vulnerable side to it. You may end up storing details of customers who visited your portal ages ago making your site heavy and vulnerable to attacks.

This is why you must regularly purge your website of customer data that you no longer need. Store only a small amount of customer records, just the data you need to process the funds.

• Be updated about the latest security patches

 

The Security requirements of every web application change continuously. When new threats and vulnerabilities emerge, it also spawns newer and better responses in the form of security patches. This includes everything from Wordpress to Magento updates to PHP to SSL patches. 

 

Be on the lookout for any security updates that come up from any or every corner. You never know who or what could strike you next.

5 Exciting Extensions in Magento

There are plenty of ecommerce platforms available in the market today that give you security, ease of use and responsiveness. The why does one platform seem to tower over the rest? The reason why Magento is the platform of choice for so many budding entrepreneurs and big businesses alike, is that it is easily customizable and extendable to suit your business objectives. 

 

This article looks at some of the extensions in Magento that greatly enhance your website’s functionality and usability.

Smart Menu

Every customer who visits an ecommerce website wants a simple and quick way to filter products. Magento enables this in its normal functionality itself through its default filter and categories menu. The smart menu extension simply extends that by integrating the category buttons in the sidebar of your page. With a collapse or expand feature and drop down support, it’s got all you asked for. 

 

Product Image View

Impressing your visitor or knocking him off often starts with simple things. Say your visitors want to zoom the image of a product they want to view. In many websites you can do this but when you’ve clicked it you realise that you have come out of the list or catalog list in your e-store. This extension allows you to directly view the magnified image of the product without having to leave your current page or catalog.

Enhanced Product Review

No customer today buys a product without going through its reviews and analysing threadbare its advantages and shortcomings. This is why you find certified buyer reviews becoming more and more popular across ecommerce sites. To this end, Magento has the Enhanced product review extension to help the customer read all reviews of the product they’re searching for, in a single page. Magento does this using its pagination support feature.

Easy Banner

Getting outstanding banners for your website is no more an issue thanks to the Easy banner extension of Magento. Slide any banner on your home page and attract visitors with exciting features for banners and content management. With a variety of gallery modes to choose from, Easy banner makes Banners and templates truly easy!

Gallery Pro

Ever wanted to create your own albums replete with categories and comments? Well, this extension allows you to do precisely that. It lets you create your own albums and sub-albums and organise them based on the topic or any criteria that you choose. You also have many options to view the photo in that particular category. Time-saving and easy to use, this extension has truly caught on amongst the users!

If eCommerce is All About Ease of Integration, X-Cart is Your Platform!

Business owners who have followed user traffic trends over the last few years might have noticed that it is not about putting up a website and making people visit it. Your website is expected to draw people in by itself without any effort (SEO, and the like) on your part. Now, if you’re catering to a particular sector, then you have at least a million websites working on ensuring the same responsiveness, security, add-ons and payment integration that you want for your website.

Then, how do you ensure that ‘you’ succeed? Well, by doing everything right, differently. Being different is all about showing the user/visitor via images, arrangement or placement of content, colours and through user experience, that your business is special. This needs to be done upfront as your website needs to literally jump on the visitor. In the end, it all reduces to how you personalise your website for the user.

X-Cart Customization

It is here that X-cart offers you a distinct advantage. Building a shopping cart needs you to integrate several different components of your business. To keep track of the customer’s session, you need to integrate the session management component which is then integrated with the product catalog application that displays the products that are sold at the storefront allowing the customer to select the product from the catalog.

Here, X-cart does a fine job by making the entire process smooth for you and you actually require very little customization as all your requirements are taken care of. Even if you do require, most of the additional modules are drag and drop, so you need not code.

Payment Integration

Once the customer has selected the product from the catalog and placed it in the shopping cart, the process moves to payments. Here is where the payment gateway needs to be integrated with your ecommerce website. The back-end database is where the product details are stored and this needs to be fed to the payment solution which will then direct the customer to the merchant payment site.

X-cart makes Merchant payment solution integration totally hassle-free for you and you can even track the customers’ buying preferences over a period of time. This functionality is ingrained in X-cart, doing away with the need to download any additional modules to use it. 

 

With simplicity, ease-of-use, customization, payment integration and user-centric development process, it is no wonder that X-cart is the most promising ecommerce platform today!

What You Should Know About ZenCart

When you start a discussion on what platform to choose to build an ecommerce site for your business, the discussion obviously veers to the ones that lead the numbers game or the platform that is chosen by the maximum number of people. But what goes rather unnoticed is that you need to choose the platform that suits your business and the objectives that you set out to achieve in the best manner. Not only should your ecommerce platform be easy-to-use and flexible along with being feature-rich, it also needs to be able to integrate all your modules to present a unified website.

So, which ecommerce website fits your bill? Before we get to that question, you need to know the essential features that your ecommerce platform should have. They are (in no specific order):

• Multilingual support
• Unlimited customization features
• Secure payment integration
• Ability to include as many categories as possible
• In-built CMS
• Made for mobile and responsive 
   

Along with all these your shopping cart must also be easy to install and use. (though there are many more features that you may require)

The one shopping cart that fulfils all of the above requirements is Zencart. The reason why we say Zen cart is primarily owing to its ease of use that enables even novices to quickly understand how to get around with it. Be it template or theme design, adding extensions, support features, payment gateway integration, nothing makes it look difficult to use. 

 

Customizing ZenCart

The key component in building any ecommerce is customization which means changing or modifying your front-end arrangement and database settings to reflect your business. If you are a small business, Zen cart has plenty of ready-to-use templates that cater to every need of yours. But if you need a template made for your business, it is best that you hire an experienced Zen cart developer who can do it for you.

Does this sound contradictory because we said Zen cart can be used by even newbies easily? Nope. This is because you need the right mix of novelty, simplicity and proportion in what you do and only developers can give you that. Updating the server and database options is one more area where you need to pay attention and this too, is best done with Zen cart developers.

How Magento Helps Your Business Expand And Adapt

Why does Magento continue to be No.1? Well, the answer is not difficult to answer for those who have studied its features and modules keenly. Magento took the pride of place among ecommerce platforms of the day principally due its performance on the security and customizability front. Add the advantage of being Open Source to all this and what you get is a comprehensive package that any business owner will find hard to refuse.

But in this article we take a look at the adaptability and mobile-easiness of Magento and how it helps businesses now more than ever before.

Power and Scalability- A Potent Combination

Now, with all of its elements that define Magento’s functionality, Magento does not compromise on versatility. The fact that it you can adjust it to suit your business and it will adapt the way you want have been of great liking to its customers. This is because ‘managing the website’, which used to take a lot of time earlier, was now reduced to a no-job.

The other scalability feature of Magento is its ability to make creation of multi-stores a very simple task. All organizations today require multiple sites a want their websites to remain flexible and dynamic. Magento has all its instruments and modules in the right place for you so much so that you wouldn’t even have the necessity of customizing it for your needs. If expansion is the watch word, Magento is your platform.

Mobile Adaptability

It is no more two websites. No more two URLs. No more of single layouts. With mobiles becoming the default mode of search, browsing and shopping, your business needs to be tailored for the mobile. And no one does this better than Magento. Modules, pictures, thumbnails, content, multimedia plugins, everything that you need to create a responsive website is tailored for the mobile. In other words, the Magento experience is essentially the mobile experience.

With the maximum extensions for any ecommerce platform, you have the room to be creative and different. From security to SEO to streaming video to social media, you have extensions that augment your capabilities in every way. All you need to do is find the right ecommerce development partner!

How Does Oscommerce Make a Difference?

When any business wants to venture into ecommerce, there is always a lot of discussion about the platform or the kind of platform that it has to choose. The usual parameters are to check which is the one currently most popular or No.1 and suggest the same. But you need to look deeper and see if the platform aligns neatly with your stated business objectives.

Identification of Your Business Objective

So, this means you need to be clear about your business objective in the first place. So, what do we mean by business objective? It means identifying what exactly you want to do with your ecommerce site in terms of the products that you are going to sell, how you want to market them, and the customer demography that you want to reach. This article looks at how Oscommerce helps you maximise your opportunities and helps you break into new customer groups.

What You Need to do?

With Oscommerce, you get the advantage of Open Source. Though this is not unique to Oscommerce, this needs to be stated nonetheless. All you need to do is identify the developer or the web development company that you want to work with and your job is done. What you need to consider to identify the right organization for the job is something we will look at later. Rich features that offer customization and multiple add-ons that you can use to infuse your own elements in the design of the website are other attributes that make Oscommerce attractive.

Something for Everyone

When you start with Oscommerce, you may have to install many attributes and this may seem a bit tasking. But on the other side, you get the perfect software that is designed to suit your needs. Defining attributes is therefore an essential process. Installation too, needs only a PHP server with an SQL database. If you do not have the budget to start an Oscommerce development project from the start (that is customized for your business), you needn’t worry about that too for Oscommerce has a wide range of templates to offer that you can choose from that considerably reduce your job. 

As for issues that you may encounter during development, Oscommerce forums are in plenty where you’ll find certified and experienced Oscommerce developers ready to find a solution to just about any problem that you throw at them. With all these advantages, it is of little surprise that Oscommerce has climbed on the ladder of the ecommerce industry in such as short span of time.

How Magento Enterprise Helps You Build Your Brand

Though there are many platforms that offer basic ecommerce solutions, Magento is among the few platforms that offer enterprise class ecommerce solutions. It combines a creative shopping cart with rich features that offer your brand’s customers a great user experience. This ability to build a brand for their customers centred on is actually at the core of Magento’s strategy.

What your website offers in terms of user experience is what defines your company’s brand for the visitors. They identify their experiences of your website with your company itself. This way, a great website helps create a set of adjectives for your company in the mind of the consumer. This process, of occupying the customer’s mindspace, is critical to building your company’s brand in the long run.

So how exactly does Magento help you build your brand on your online store-fronts? Basically, what does your ecommerce website need to build a better brand for your company? Here are they:

• Marketing your product and packaging it
  
  
• Selling channels, be it stores or website or catalog
  
  
• Building better customer experience through a wide range of extensions that cater to all customer needs.
  
  

With Magento enterprise edition, you get features that satisfy your needs in all the 3 areas like:

1. Magento does a fine job balancing the text, imagery and space on your screen by giving all of them equal preference. It also represents the functional elements in a way other ecommerce platforms have not been able to do.

2. Magento structures content and separates product categories in a unique way giving users the look and feel of a trusted brand that is sure of itself.

3. Finally, you get a whole lot of extensions that help you widen the functionality of your website and improve its usability and security.

Have you got the Magento enterprise advantage? Get in touch with developers who have the competence to build your company’s next-gen ecommerce website.