Consider you are beginning an online store. You have done research and come to know that shopping cart solutions play an important role. Just like in any physical shops, the shopping cart accompanies a visitor to your website the moment he enters till he checks out. And it does much more than the physical shopping carts. The software makes the really good ecommerce shopping cart do additional jobs. Selecting the cart is important, that’s the reason.

Aware of these factors, you have prepared a checklist of features you want for your shopping cart. But go over the checklist again from the viewpoint of customer service. Your business can grow if you get not only new customers but also repeat business from existing customers. To have your customers keep buying from you, can your shopping cart software help? Yes, it can, by providing additional services to them.

You should allow current customers at your Internet store to see histories of their previous purchases. This makes it much easier for customers to remember purchases that they had intended to make on earlier visits. It also makes it much simpler for patrons to choose purchases on their current visit.

Any customer going for shopping prepares a list of products which he dreams of buying. In a situation like this, it will be helpful if the shopping cart has an option to display the customer’s wish list. If this list is displayed during his subsequent visits, he can make up his mind about purchase. It also is useful if the cart displays the products of his interest, which he has not purchased during his earlier visits. A ‘Thank You’ note while checking out on the shopping cart will be good for repeated purchase.

We all love bargains. It is in the human nature to get more for less. If you happen to have a discount sales on products the customer had bought before, he would certainly like to know about your special offers and your sales will also increase. For these additional services, you just have to visualize yourself as the seller in a ‘brick-and-mortar’ store, attending to a regular client. Would you not point out to him about discounts or new models available now of products he usually buyed?

Good shopping cart software should help you keep in touch with your customers outside of your website. Transaction details should be sent for information and for customer’s record purposes by the means of a confirmatory email. Also, you may wish to send e-newsletters announcing new products, festival or clearance sale, special or combo offers.

If you are someone looking to sell stuff online, then the PHP shopping cart software is for you.  With the ability to build a search engine friendly online store, there is no wonder why people are using this as their ecommerce solution.  There are a number of benefits you will get out of PHP shopping cart making the offer too good to turn down.

If you are considering purchasing the PHP shopping cart software, you will find benefits right from the beginning.  Unlike some software that only accepts credit cards online the PHP software accepts credit cards and PayPal payments, making it much more convenient for you.

When purchasing with your choice of payment, you will also notice how cheap the software is for what you will get out of it.  There are multiple styles of software, each having their own benefits.  The most expensive PHP shopping cart software is the premium edition, which runs at $299.  The premium edition is the ecommerce solution as it provides all of the Shop-Script Pro features plus other exclusive advantages.

The PHP shopping cart itself comes completely ready to run.  There is no programming required to set it up, allowing you to save time in the beginning stages.  The program is user friendly and extremely easy to work with.  You will find that it is easy to design integration in any HTML editor, giving you options to build it around your business.

Every WebCart hosted solution shopping cart includes Ecommerce Hosting. WC uses dedicated servers that are engineered specifically for E-commerce to provide you with an unparalleled ecommerce hosting environment.
By using the best technology and state of the art Linux systems we provide guaranteed 99.9% uptime.

Our protected servers are dual 3.0 GHz processors, with 2.5GB of memory each, sitting on top of a superfluous, multi-homed, dedicated network.

We understand that reliability is a big concern for online store owners; therefore, WebCart pays our hosting supplier to make sure that packets of information are delivered to the end user’s eyeballs. This can offers significant advantages over simply peering with the major backbones. Peering agreements hardly ever include Service Level Agreements (SLAs) so no one is responsible for lost packets at crammed exchange points. Because we actually have SLAs with all our providers, we are able to promise that all packets will leave our network at full speed.

Since security is a big threat too many small online businesses WebCart’s data center is inaccessible from everyone except four technicians. Unrestricted access is strictly forbidden. Admittance to the floor of the data hub resides on is restricted to those holding military-grade pass cards.

In my pervious post I discussed the importance of technical support when it comes to the installation of shopping cart software. In this post I will discuss the issue of security, and how it relates to osCommerce vs. WebCart.

Shopping Cart Security:

The issue with osCommerce

The criteria for shopping cart software ought to include the ability to provide top notch security for online stores. The concern with open source software is its source code, (which in simple terms means the “soul” or “brain” of a program) is available to anyone who requests it. This seemingly innocent source code gives hackers and those who wish harm on your eCommerce store, an added opportunity to hack your site. Obviously the developers of osCommerce plug holes as they become known, however, the holes are usually plugged after the damage has already been done. Often times leaving eCommerce merchants the heartbreaking task of picking up the pieces.

The difference with WebCart

WebCart’s shopping cart software is built with PHP (which stands for Hypertext Preprocessor) the same language that osCommerce uses to built its software. However, unlink osCommerce WebCart is not open source, which means that less then a handful of developers have access to its source code. For the online store owner, this means hackers are far less likely to exploit any vulnerabilities with in WebCart’s shopping cart software. No piece of software is 100% safe, but what do exist are software solutions that are safer then others. An easy to understand example of this is OS X tiger vs, Windows XP, with the latter being less secure. In order to add an additional layer of protection, the developers of WebCart hired previous hackers (who have now changed their ways) to examine and find holes in our shopping cart software. After 3 weeks our developers plugged every whole identified by the x hacking team.

In the next post I will discuss custom functionality in both osCommerce and WebCart.

The key to search engine optimization is content, the more keyword rich content a website has the better chances the search engines will rank its keywords. Writing content is a pain in part because unless a website hires a full time writer, it often times because a burden to write content full time. The good news I always let my clients know, is that all webmasters need to spend is about 15 minutes every day on content creation, in order to see SEO benefits Every company should have something to write about, for example a section called “company news” can be an extremely beneficial source of content for a shopping cart. The reason is simple; every company, no matter how small, has something new going on which they can write about. In addition, who else on this plant knows more about a company then the owner of a small business?

Another great technique I recommend is writing articles about how the products you are selling operate. An example would be a company which sells business telephone systems. If I were creating content for this site I would start by describing the many models that I have for sale. Followed by, the features of each telephone model, Basically, I would write my own mini review on the pros and cons of each telephone system. Finally, I would write a series of articles about how these phone systems can benefit potential clients. If you have been running a successful online, I am sure you already have a lot of content scattered through out your site. The tick is to get it in to one place and create a structure around it.

WebCart was engineered with SEO as a top priority. Therefore, in every standard version WebCart meets the criteria for shopping cart software by adding useful SEO tools pre-built and ready to be used. As a result, creating a news section within an eCommerce website is easy and painless. An article system is also pre-built which make posting and organizing articles by category, topic or keyword a breeze, for even the most inexperienced user.

Links and Link exchange are perhaps one of the most popular and effective ways to increase ranking within a search engine. Those of you who has have looked in to SEO AKA search engine optimization know what linking is all about. I am not here to tell you that links are not an effective tool. However, I will say that many people don’t take the correct approach when it comes to exchanging links. Let me explain….

There is a debate amongst SEO professionals on the actual weight of links, but regardless most believe any link is better then no link. However, a targeted link is worth a lot more then just any random link on a directory or within someone’s link exchange program. If you are curious by what I mean by “targeted links� let me explain. For the sake of this blog post let’s say I have a shopping cart client who sells woman’s shoes. When I get to the process of finding links for his store I have a few options. One, I can use my extensive database of online directories and submit the online shoe store to as many free and moderately paid directories as possible. Second, I could search for websites and directories which are related to shoes or woman’s shoes. While it may take additional time to look for specific links the reward is to a great extent greater. Many people are not aware that Google, Yahoo and Msn love one way links from related industry web sites.

The process of obtaining related links can be difficult. That being said let me share one valuable tip that any web site can use. Look for a fre high page rank web site related to your business. I usually look for informational sites, but eCommerce and personal web sites are also ok. Once you find the sites attempt to contact the webmaster by phone and strike up a relationship. Offer to put his link on one of your other websites if he would place your link on his. This strategy tends to work if the business is small and friendly.

Good luck with your SEO strategies and stay tuned for more tips on shopping carts, internet marketing and organic SEO.
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