Well if you’re reading this chances are you either have an e-commerce site that is live and doing business or you are at least contemplating launching your very own online store front. One of the first steps you’ll need to take is making a decision on how you’ll chose your e-commerce platform. This is not going to be fun and I’ll guarantee you that you are going to be confused, misled, and frustrated at some point during your research.

If you read my last post about hosted eCommerce solutions you’ll have a few good ideas about what to look for but one place you’re going to inevitably end up landing is a shopping cart review site. There are tons of them just like there are a million hosting review sites. Why? You’d be pretty dense to not figure this one out. Most, if not all of those review sites are not actually reviewing the eCommerce platforms rather taking payment for advertisement. See just like you’ll want to rank high and sell products online to people who landed on your page via Google search or through pay per click advertising they’ve realized that there is a huge market that is growing wildly for online commerce solutions to sell their products. Most of the top ranking sites or pay per click sites you’ll stumble upon are not legit. They do not load a catalog, manage a template, or sell a product online. Instead they collect money from shopping cart solution providers and rank according to how much advertising fee was paid. Or they may be operating as an affiliate collecting a fee for each person they send on to the merchant. Who ranks at the top? You guess who.

So how do you get a legitimate review of different hosted shopping carts available on the market today? Unfortunately you’re going to have to talk to customers, read tons of blog articles, and do the research yourself. Of course there are the monsters like Volusion, 1Shoppingcart, and Shopify but there are also the free solutions trying to make money in alternative approaches all vying for your business like Magento and others. As with anything making the decision should not be based on what you read in advertising or who has the coolest features but rather how successful your online store is going to be on that platform, how well you’re going to be able to manage it, and what your total cost of ownership will be.

If anybody does know of a legit eCommerce review site that has actually thoroughly went through the options I’d be dying to hear about them but I’m not sure they’d remain around long as it’s a lot of work for no return. Until next time happy selling.

There’s a reason why companies like Walmart, Fred Myers, Target, and others have dominated the retail space. Of course, they’ve done exceptional at eliminating costs on the backend and built stores the size of small towns but there is something else they do very well. Successful brick and mortar retail merchants have perfected the art of commerce. When you walk into a store you are guided down a path that maximizes revenue and commitment to purchase. There is plenty of in your face marketing to gently inform you what products you should be buying, what’s on sale, and what’s hot. Finalize your trip at the front of the store and you’ll see something dramatically different in a major retailer in comparison with a small mom and pop operation. Tons of lanes to check out in that are customized to each individual. There are the standard lanes for those uncomfortable with the optional computerized checkout lanes. Fast, fast, fast, and don’t forget to pick up your magazine, candy, and last minute essentials as you pay.

These stores are built this way for a reason. It’s successful but it didn’t happen overnight. There are tools in the industry, consultants, and analytics to measure results. As we enter the age of eCommerce the smart will realize they need those same tools on their websites and online shopping carts. This is why it’s so important to pick an E-Commerce solution that fits your business model. We’ll take a look at a few essential check off items in this part, 1 of 3 in our discussion on choosing the most effective hosted shopping cart solution.

Simple eCommerce setup

A lot of solutions are either too slimmed down or too robust. There doesn’t seem to be anything that’s in the middle as far as hosted e-commerce solution setups go. Make sure the provider you choose pays close attention offering wizards or helpful step by step instructions for setting up your online store front.

Managing your Catalog

All online eCommerce shopping carts will provide some sort of catalog feature to enable you to manage your products. Make sure it’s very intuitive for you to import and export items you decide to sell online and that there are easy ways to add SKUs, product images, product descriptions, and prices. Higher end e-commerce platforms will allow you to build groups and select policies, run analytics, and price changes on multiple items in your storefront at once.

E-Commerce Templates

Do you have your own eCommerce website? Are you going to have a developer design a website for you? Or do you want to use a template to create your storefront and go from there. This is a very important decision and aspect of your online business. Some solutions like Volusion and Shopify are more catered to the mom and pop online reseller and have a lot of ready to go templates while others like Ultracart have more advanced custom templates that you can provide to your developer to customize and optimize your hosted shopping cart for optimized checkout experiences.

Advertising and Marketing your Storefront

Of course you need to make sure you get your name out there and you hosted e-commerce solutions should be carrying some of this load for you. Make sure the shopping cart is SEO friendly and optimized for Google search results. Nicer options are the ability to generate email lists, provide coupons, tie into solutions like Froogle, Google’s shopping feed, accept affiliate marketers and allow them to be compensated on their online sales leads, and more. Make sure it’s something you research with each shopping cart.

Performance Measuring and eCommerce Analytics

In order to be successful you need to make sure you are tracking every aspect of your e-commerce business. That means product success, price strategies, pages or articles that are frequented, and other things related to your website need to be studied. You need to know also how your visitors interact with you eCommerce storefront. Are you loosing sales at checkout? Is one advertisement working better than the other? If you can’t answer those questions you may want to take advise from an e-commerce consultant who is an expert in the industry.

Payment Gateways and Shipping Products

Collecting money would sure be nice huh? Take a look at what merchant gateways the hosted e-commerce solutions supports. Top vendors would be PayPal, authorize.net, and 2Checkout but there are many others that have advantages depending on the volume of sales you do and type of transactions that occur. You’ll also need to make sure that shipping is an automated or near automated process. Are you using FedEx, UPS, or USPS? Do you know your shipping dimensions and can you import them into your shopping cart catalog? How do you plan to manage returns inside your eCommerce platform? Keep looking deeper inside as the choices you make today are not easy to change tomorrow.

On the next post we’ll talk a bit more about choosing e-commerce solution providers and hosted shopping cart solutions digging into advanced options like: Evaluating review sites and weeding out internet spam marketing about e-commerce. Until then take care.

Okay, I know it’s tough to rank up on the G but cmon lately it’s seeming impossible to do anything right.  G changes everything at least once a quarter now and the black-hatters are catching up too fast for them.  Oh, it’s keywords, no it’s meta, no it’s backlinks, no it’s pagerank, no it’s a balance. NO, it’s NOTHING.

In the last 9 months I’ve watched 12 properties that I own all eCommerce or pointing to eCommerce sites hosted with shopping carts get annihilated by domains that not only have next to 0 content but in many cases were registered less then a month before they were in the top 5 rank on G’s front page.  WTF. Maybe they’re trustworthy sites that posted a new topic and their strength took them to the top in record times. Yeah right.  They are on the front page before normal URLs are listed.  How is this happening. Well it doesn’t take much research to figure out how.

There are tons of techniques and even software available now for the crowd that’s willing to go to the darkside and not concerned with long term interests for their properties.  And why would they be with properties that look like atrocities (any tld, large character domains just to cover keywords, and $5 worth of outsourced content) . Then they use one of many techniques to artificially ping their site with thousands to millions of fake hits in order to get listed in rapid fashion.  Once listed they begin a process either manually or more often then not with software like seNuke to build a completely artificial backlink system called a link-wheel.  This has the ability to produce thousands of links a day. So in a matter of weeks or months at the longest there they are topping your site that you’ve spent years working on, writing your own content, doing your own research, trying to add some value to what you are selling rather than just profit from a few ads and bail next week.

G’s response. Well Mr. Cutts states in a YouTube response that while blackhat techniques will rise and fall your whitehat strategy will prevail in the longterm.  What about those of us that are feeding ourselves with eCommerce sales? What about those truly looking for a product review, or real information on a subject. One to two months to weed out the scam sites is not quick enough. That can costs thousands of dollars out of somebodies living income.

The question is how many will start looking into the grey area or darker to keep their domains ranking high enough to make money? It’s only a matter of time before everybody has to resort to lowre quality content an higher quantity of tactics just to survive. What does that do to the web though? What does that do to G?

Call me an end of world’est kind of guy but I think search is slowly dying in the way we know it. How many times a day do you hit G now compared to let’s say a year ago? An no not to see where you rank but to look for something or collect the news or research something. I see a huge trend of automating these types of processes. Leveraging social networks and trusted relationships for information, feeds for news, and trusted authorities like Amazon for shopping. My wife commented the other day she goes straight to stores she knows from the brick and mortar days or something she has seen on traditional advertising like Overstock.com, Amazon, and others because she’s afraid of where she’ll end up just by searching. Take for example, the term Dark Eye Circle. My wife like any woman spends way too much money on cosmetics and she was looking at some outlandishly overpriced solution for eye circles. First rank in G is a site that’s clearly bullshish.  It’s a review site pumping up a product with perfect 5 out of 5 review and the rest of the contenders with very poor results. I’d bet my yearly salary that the person who wrote the site has never even seen a bottle of the product little on try it and review it. So how does a manufacturer that say spent millions in research and development to make something real compete in the eCommerce world when they know that they’ll need to spend that much just to rank in the fastest growing way of marketing (search). I’m saying they eventually wont. They’ll find new ways to promote their product more affordable.

What is your take? Are you tired of bogus results busting through your hard work? Are you excited about techniques that ruin legacy competition? Let us know in the comments section.

Wow, first post on the blog.  Am I alone in thinking that eCommerce is still relatively new to the world?  I mean sure there are only a million articles, websites, and blogs about the subject but just how new is this portion of the web.  Well, let’s think about that for minute.  When was the first time you bought something online?  Or better yet when was the first time you sold something online.  If you’re like most people out there it was probably on a site we all love to hate now.  eBay.  I’m sure there is great debate on the first major online retailer but my vote goes to eBay.  Sure, Amazon is an amazing platform that has revolutionized the internet but most got their start submitting a credit card or other form of payment on the great auction site.

A lot has changed since those early days of online selling.  The question is what’s next.  It’s only a matter of time before a greater shift occurs from traditional brick and mortar shopping to online shopping cart shopping.  That leaves a lot of concerns and questions for both consumers and customers right?  I mean when I look online for products it’s very dissimilar to shopping in the physical world.  Granted some of the basics still shape my shopping experience such as quality of the storefront, prices, and the selection of products but there is a whole lot more that comes into play.  For example, when I go for a drive with an itch in my wallet to blow a few hundred dollars on the new must have gadget I usually pop into a Fry’s or BestBuy.  However, when online the first place I hit is Google or another search engine.  If there was a second place it would be NewEgg.  Why is it that so many that have loyal followings to their favorite brick and mortar stores loose that loyalty the instant FireFox launches?  How has Google, shopping cart optimization, SEO, and the plethora of other dynamic challenges impacted business and consumer decisions so vastly.  This and many other questions are what we aim to deliver on this blog.  Please subscribe to our feeds and I’ll promise that if you are a traditional retailer, E Commerce developer, website designer, or a concerned consumer you’ll find great information every week here.