When setting up an online shop there are many different things you have to consider. The first few choices that you make at the beginning of your venture could have a lasting impact on your future as an online merchant. Among the many tasks that you will have to complete is the research into and the purchase of a shopping software sliution for your business. There are so many options out there, and I can help you to recognise the 20 most important features that you should consider when making your decision.

• 1. You need to make sure that the software can handle a detailed search and description of your items.
• 2. Pictures of your products are also essential in most industries.
• 3. You will also need to make sure that the database can keep up to date with stock availability and illustrate this to the customer in real time.
• 4. You want a detailed level of feedback from your software program with reports regarding traffic, inventory and sales figures.
• 5. The best software will also include an order management system and will keep this updated in real time.
• 6. Hosting and website building software is normally included with the best packages these days, and if you still don’t have a website then these are essential items.
• 7. You need to make sure that your shopping software allows payment by as many methods as possible, as payment flexibility is a key issue.
• 8. Some software will also be able to adapt to location and include the relevant debit cards that may be available in specific areas.
• 9. Credit cards can either be processed in real time or not, and this should definitely be a consideration of yours when making your choice.
• 10. It is essential that you take the time to look into how a piece of software deals with security issues and what kind of fraud protection tolis it has on board.
• 11. Another consideration if you are an international business is whether the software can be localised to a specific region and include the appropriate taxes and currency conversions.
• 12. Some software has an up-sell feature to try and increase your sales, you may or may not want this feature depending on your business model.
• 13. The possibility of remembering your customers through cookie tracking or other methods is also offered by some sliutions and is definitely worth thinking about. Marketing is very important, and some software include these functions which are worth your consideration;
• 14-18. affiliate programs, email tolis, search engine submission, optimisation and gift codes - otherwise known as voucher codes or discount codes - are all part of the many marketing considerations for you to make.
• 19. Then of course there is the price, definitely worthy of your consideration. Does a package charge a one off setup fee or does it work through a recurring monthly price structure.
• 20. Last but not least, I would advise you to find a piece of software that is well designed and has a great user interface, if you can navigate around a package well then your visitors are probably able to as well.

Competing with the “big guys”

There might be 1000 web sites or more just like yours on the internet. So how do you compete? The “big guys” dominate the search engines, and you might find it hard to get into the first 20 pages. Many internet users won’t look beyond the first page of the internet search, almost none look beyond the second or third Pages. Again, how do you compete? By knowing something that the “big guys” don’t. Enter the long tail.

Most Searches are Unique

More the 70% of searches performed on a search engine are unique, meaning that the query has seldom or never been used as a search term. It seems as though most searches would be more alike than not. Well in fact, they are. It’s how the search is worded that makes it unique. The 30% of searches that are not unique includes most of what makes up a typical SEO’s keyword and key
phrase list. If you run a website that sells used books, it might make sense to target the key phrase such as “used books”. It is true that good search engine standings for the key phrase “used books” make sense if what you are selling is used books.. Why stop there?

How Customers find your site

The question to ask yourself is: How are my customers finding my website? The best way to find the answer to that question is to look at your sites log files. There are plenty of programs available for free or for a fee, that will allow you to view the statistics. Of your site in an easy to read format. Awstats provides a nice looking, easy to use interface, for viewing a website statistics. Awstats allows you to view a complete listing of all of the keywords and key phrases your users employed to find your site.

If you look at the Used Book site statistics, you might find that 60% of the sites visitors came back from a search engine. Of those, 20% used the key phrase “Used books” to find the site, 8% used “Old Books”, and 3% used “Antique Books”. Each of the remaining keywords and key phrases were used by one or two visitors to find the site: terms such as “Tattered binding” and “Shakespeare
originals” and even common misspellings like “tatered Cover” or “The Dark night”. You might even find that there are some longer key phrases like “How to sell a collection of used books for cheap and fast”.

These lesser used keywords and phrases are the long tail. They make up a very high proportion of searches conducted on the internet. This is one reason why they are so important. Another reason that they are so important is the fact that little is known about the long tail. Most SEO’s and web site marketers ignore the long tail in favor of targeting the more competitive keywords.

Targeting the long tail should be at the top of any serious SEO or webmasters priorities. Making use of these keywords and phrases throughout your site can potentially increase your sites traffic as much as 2 or 3 times.

Online shopping is big business today and it is only going to grow and develop more in the future. Online shopping is the process of using the Internet to purchase goods and services, something that in the past was always done on the high street and in the public eye. An online retailer or wholesaler is the equivalent of the real world shops that are on high streets and in shopping malls everywhere, but there are many key differences as well. An online shop can offer shoppers many advantages over shopping on the high street, and there are a few disadvantages to note as well.

The high street and the shopping malls can offer the community a socially interactive way of shopping, here the customer can interact with the merchants and also with the other customers. Shopping is a social activity for a lot of people and in this regard online shops can not really compete. There are other advantages to using the high street as well, as some people like to see their goods before they make a purchase, especially with things like furniture or clothing that they may wish to try out. There are lots of other areas however where online shopping offers many advantages over traditional shopping.

Electronic shopping can give customers a high level of convenience and a huge selection of goods and services from all over the world. There are also economic benefits as some online shops can offer better prices due to lower overheads. Online merchants generally offer a shipping service as part of the package, so customers can have their new goods delivered right to their homes. The delivery process when buying from the high street is not as seamless and often does not even exist.

Payment methods are different online as cash shopping is certainly not an option. This mirrors the general trend towards a cashless society and does not present many people with any difficulty. Credit card and other electronic transactions do have their problems though and fraud is a definite issue when shopping online. Although electronic fraud is much lower than the public perception of it is, some people are still kept away from online shopping because of this worry. All in all, online shopping offers a great alternative to high street shopping, the many advantages of convenience and efficient can complement the high street and do not have to compete directly with it.

As an online retailer you need to have a great software shopping environment for your customers to use. Shopping cart software packages come in all shapes and sizes and it is important that you find out which features are essential for your business before you make a purchase. You may not need all of the features that are out there, but how do you decide what bits and pieces are essential for you. This can be hard sometimes, and I can help by listing what I believe are the 10 most essential features of any shopping cart software solution, things that no online merchant should be without.

1. You need a package that can calculate the applicable shipping and tax charges for a location and make them known to the buyer as soon as possible in the transaction process.

2. You also need a customisable and flexible relationship between your cart and the rest of your web site. A lot of online shoppers get fed up with shopping carts that do not interact properly with a merchant’s main browsing pages. A ‘return to’ shopping cart that continually updates itself is essential for a streamlined business.

3. An automatic email confirmation feature is the third essential that I will list, as this gives a buyer a sense of confidence and automates the receipt sending procedure.

4. The fourth essential is that the software must use a respected anti fraud solution to help keep you safe, and the fifth it to.

5. use third party validators such as ScanAlert or Verisign to keep your safety in check and increase your credibility amongst your customer base.

6. The sixth essential feature in a shopping cart application is the ability for a customer to control and modify the shipping information of their purchase. Studies have shown that many transactions are abandoned because a customer is unable to find or modify the delivery information.

7. The seventh feature I will mention is to have software with the ability to use discount codes and voucher codes in the checkout process. These are an increasing promotional tool for online business and even if you are not using them now, you may be in the future.

8. The eighth feature I am listing is to have a cart which a customer can print out or email in order to keep a copy of the transaction.

The last two features I will mention may seem obvious but many free and open source shopping carts do not have them included.

9&10. A shopping cart must include credit card processing, preferably in real time, and also its own integrated payment gateway. Many cheap and free solutions do not offer this and instead use services like paypal and google for their gateway, this makes you reliant on other organisations and is much less flexible for you in the long run.

What would be the first most important thing an ecommerce website needs? Well, it needs traffic. Believe it or not, eBay can do this for you. In addition to getting a free inbound link to your website, you might also make some additional income through adsense. Lastly, eBay will help you get the right kind of audience for your website.

For all those who are still wondering what eBay is, eBay is an extremely popular auction site on the cyberspace these days. At the same time as it is great for auctions, it is also an easy way to generate traffic on your website. Initially, you need to identify your niche market. In case you are new and do not know your niche, refer to the seller guidelines on the eBay website. The next step would be to generate proper keywords for your products. Obviously, any ecommerce site is incomplete without the details of the product. Misinformation can turn out to be pretty expensive on eBay. As an example, a simple jug worth £100 was sold for £46,800 as the jug was wrongly described. It claimed that it was made up some rare Italian circa which wasn’t the case.

So let’s start making some money now. Besides your regular sales, there are so many ways you can generate some additional income for your website. A lot of huge portals and major search engines have their own affiliate programs. The most popular out of these is the “Google Adsense” program that displays ads on your website. These ads are supplied by Google on your website and then you will be paid for displaying those ads. The eBay affiliates program functions in a similar manner. You can easily coordinate with eBay to display item lists or eBay links on your site that are relevant to the content. eBay in turn pays you some commission for the new membership and also pays you for the sales that happened when the users clicked from your particular webpage. Moreover, there is also an application programming interface that helps you customize the kinds of eBay links that will appear on your website. This will heighten your ability to drive some substantial amount of traffic to eBay.

A great tip for an ecommerce website would be to use a package known as the “Wordtracker”. This will give you an incredible overview of what keywords should you be optimizing for your website to get better rankings in the search engine. It comes along with a list of keywords and their importance. Better rankings would certainly mean more traffic and more sales.

Processing of payment basically means to buy goods and service through the internet by means of using a credit card for payment. The processing of the financial transaction is real time. It is used as an alternative for small businesses that have a significantly lesser turnover especially from transaction via cards or who are unable to activate a merchant account, a special account with any bank that acquires. There are virtually only three steps for payment mechanism by means of credit card.

1.    Obtain a merchant account for getting a credit card from a particular bank.
2.    Choose a gate way for process of information related to credit card.
3.    Integration is done with payment gateway and payment processor through which the payment is done.

A payment processing company offers such services of payment of money for the goods sold over the internet and all that you need to do to integrate your website with a payment gateway is you need to add a ‘buy’ button on to your order or product page. This will help in directing buyers to the payment processor. By means of the buy button one can send information about themselves as a merchant as well as the order particulars to the payment processor. The process will act in the payment gateway’s environment or with in the website used and the payment gate way just acts as a focal point of sorts of sales devices.

The major charge backs in this system could be Charge backs are basically debits that are made against your merchant credit card by the bank. This can be because of a variety of reasons like for instance an error might have occurred in the transaction or in most cases because a buyer would have contested the charges on their credit card. Charge backs are a common occurrence in the transactions of the real-world. Yet, the anonymity that internet offers as well as the cardholders lack of being present physically to sign are more likely to have their bank issue a charge back against them. The best ways to avoid gateways that are fraudulent are to maintain order in a stage by stage fashion, maintaining documentation of all transactions and have the customers queries addressed in a systematic fashion.

The biggest advantage of Payment processing company is that it relieves the company of dealing with administrative work of dealing with the client’s merchant account, You are saved from setting up a secure gateway of payment as the one created for stock trading websites where huge money has to be spent, time spent could be saved than that spent on for a merchant account. The application procedures are also less strict when compared to a merchant account. For example a detailed version of your business plan, their suppliers, trading history has to be provided in case a merchant account is in use in which case the entire procedure becomes much stricter and usage becomes tedious.

There are a few disadvantages if you use such payment processing companies connecting through your website such as the customer who uses your website will know that the payment does not reach you directly even though it is connected through your website and the user makes payment through your own website.

The settlement period taken by payment processing companies is another problem faced as they take as much 30-60 days before the money reaches your account. Generally, the charges for a merchant account are high. Costs, however are thankfully falling as the market for such services is highly competitive. It is also necessary to make sure if the payment processor provides seller fraud protection which could save you from costs of fraudulent activities.

Repetitive use of the card can lead to the value of transactions made to be reclaimed from your own business. It is now possible to have insurance to cover any sort of potential risks that you are liable to face.

The current turmoil in the UK economy brought about  by rising food and fuel cost coupled with the credit crunch is bringing about significant shift in the shopping habit of consumers. Shoppers are deserting the high street for online shopping in search or better deal, this helped online sales in the first half of this year reach  £26.5bn for the first time, this is an increase of 38% on the same period last year, according to e-commerce group IMRG and Capgemini.

Online retailers are usually able to undercut their high street counterpart because they generally have less overheads. Apart from items bought online being cheaper than the high street, shopping online is also less stressful and cheaper because your purchases are delivered to your door, saving on the cost of fuel for driving to the high street and parking cost.

Though web-based shopping continued to outperform the High Street according to the report, the credit crunch and rising inflation also affected online sales when compared with the growth experienced by Internet sales in 2007.

The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN), the body responsible for governing domain name extension worldwide, at a meeting in Paris last week voted to liberalise the process of creating a new top level domain name (TLD).

The newly approved rules governing creation of new web address will start from 2009, under the new rules, companies, individual, cities or countries can have web address ending in whatever suffix they like, for example, .london could be created for London or .Wales for wales. Companies with deep pocket can have a domain extension for themselves, for example, British Telecom can create a .bt or Boss Cart for that matter could have .bosscart domain extension. Getting the approval to create your own web address surfix is expected to cost between £25,000 - £50,000.

Creating a new web address suffix is not expected to be based on ability to buy a suffix only, ICANN CEO Paul Twomey said proposed new web address suffix could still be blocked by ICANN if its deemed to be immoral such as the proposed .xxx which was rejected last year.

The announcement was welcomed in some quarters, while others such as people responsible for protecting companies copyright thinks it will be a challenging when hundreds of new web address suffix goes online from next year, it will be costly registering all possible domain extensions to prevent it from falling into the hands of cybersquatters.

This announcement could potentially benefit ecommerce website, many desirable ecommerce domain extension are either in use or hoarded by cybersquatters, creation of new TLD will free small business from having to pay a lot of money to buy quality domain name from cybersquatters, instead, you can just register one of the new extension for your ecommerce project.

A major clothing retail company recently announce that its website was hacked and customers credit card details were stolen, thought the credit card information were said to be encrypted, the company still advised its customers to contact their credit card issuers to cancel their credit cards.

Sadly, news like this do come from ecommerce websites every now and again, this kind of news damages consumer confidence in online transactions, some people are wary of buying online as they feel their credit card details and personal information may fall into the wrong hands.

Here are a few tips to help buyers and sellers conduct online transactions safely and securely.

Tips for safe online transactions

• Ensure the site you are buying from has a valid SSL certificate.
• Keep your computer free of spywares and viruses to prevent you credit card details from being stolen via malicious software.
• Ensure you credit card company has your most up to date phone number, credit card companies always call to verify transactions that are not typical of you account profile.
• Buy from reputable merchants only, if you are not sure of a website, no matter how tempting the offer, its better to play it safe, check the identity of the company before making a purchase.
• Be suspicious of email from any organisation claiming to be acting on behalf of your bank, you should even be careful of email claiming to be from you bank, always call your bank to confirm that they actually sent the email.
• Never follow a link on an email asking you to update you credit card information on a merchants site, its better to go directly to the merchant via the url you have for them.
• Some credit card companies such as Cahoot issue a temporary credit card number that is only valid for one transaction, use such card instead of you regular credit card for online transaction.

Now a days, the future success of most commercial enterprise seem to depend largely on the Internet. Yesterday on front row; a Radio 4 programme, it was said that for the first time ever, royalties from music sold as digital downloads online exceeded royalties from selling music in its traditional format; CD. It is said that this trend has barely started.

The frantic pace of growth of eCommerce is having a devastating effect on profit margins on the High Street, some High Street retailers are even closing down or reducing the number stores in the have on the High Street because of stiff competition from online retailers. Consumer preference is shifting decisively from the High Street to the convenience and price competitiveness offered by eCommerce.

eCommerce software, you shop online

While the ambitious organisations are building and consolidating their online presence, some companies are yet to put an effective online strategy in place. There are many possible reasons for this.
Among SMEs the main reason is the lack of knowledge and skills required deploy an eCommerce websites, in some cases the reason is finance related. An eCommerce
software from large organisation such as Microsoft costing thousands of pounds is a significant purchase many small businesses could not afford.

Boss Cart Premium was created to make eCommerce affordable and available to small businesses with desire to grown their business online but without the thousands of pounds a solution like Microsoft small business server would cost them.
The success of our free ecommerce software, Boss Cart JV demonstrated to us that small businesses would like to test the eCommerce waters if the price is right. Using experience and data collected from Boss Cart JV users, we developed a new eCommerce shopping cart system, Boss Cart Premium, it contains significant improvements over the JV series and unlike the JV series, the premium range come with comprehensive support via our ticketing system and
on the telephone. You can find out more information about Boss Cart Premium here.