If you plan to sell physical products, digital products or even a large number of services from your website, you might be considering setting up a shopping cart. Many large eTailers offer checkout solutions for their websites, and as the internet has grown more “mature”, there are an increasing number of shopping cart solutions available.

However, before outright buying a shopping cart system for your website, there is something that you should consider. Mainly, whether you will run the shopping cart from your website or whether you will purchase, or “rent”, a shopping cart system from a third party website.

Remotely hosted shopping cart solution

Usually a hosted shopping cart solution requires little technical knowhow and less setup time than a shopping cart that you would run from your own website. Other than adding products, defining prices and setting up the shopping cart template, if this is an option, you’ll be up and running in a few days to as little as a few hours.

Some hosted shopping cart solutions offer optional marketing packages which may (or may not) help you drive targeted traffic to your shopping website. While these all-in-one shopping cart packages are normally pricey, they can certainly help the new online shop to get the most out of their new website right away without having to take the time to learn how to market on their own. (more…)

Internet marketing Guru’s swear by them, and you’ve no doubt heard the phrase “the money’s in the list” more times than you care to acknowledge. Certainly running an email list can be lucrative, but why is it so lucrative, and how can you build a mailing list that not only increases sales, but increases your website traffic as well?

Why running a mailing list can increase sales

It’s statistically proven that on average a person must be exposed to a website or offer 7 times before they’ll make a purchase. While the underlying reason for this fact is not as clear as the “magic number” itself, running a mailing list allows you to keep your primary offer in front of perspective buyers until they purchase or they unsubscribe from your list.

Of course, a mailing list that is sent to potential consumers that is blatantly sales-focused will undoubtedly suffer from a high unsubscribe rate. Giving your potential customers value amongst subtle recommendations is a much better practice than blasting advertisements with no real value to their email inbox every other day. Get to know your subscribers and know what kind of questions that they are asking; if you cater to their needs with free information or free resources, over time they will learn to trust your insight and will be more likely to act (purchase a product or service) based on your recommendation alone. (more…)

osCommerce is the e-commerce software which can be downloaded for free and makes it possible to setup an online shopping site. osCommerce is a full featured web application and makes online shopping possible easy for the shop holder an the customer. Released under the GNU General Public License (open source), osCommerce came into existence in the year 2000 and is the brain that runs approximately more than 15.500 online stores.

For making an e-commerce site attractive to the prospective customers it is very important that the look of the web shop and the services that it provides are highly professional. osCommerce helps to make this task easier as it has several advanced features that makes it possible to maintain the inventory of the products and display the products online, deals with the payments and processes the orders, thus in effect it takes care of most of the functions of an e-commerce store. The free software osCommerce can installed within minutes and the new shop owner is able to insert his products immediately. (more…)