Webshops - Changing Online Shopping Experiences

Ecommerce is taking the world of business by a storm. The way we conduct business, market and shop is all changing and going online. Reduced supply chains and value chains are adding to business's bottom line and top line, giving businesses the much-needed money for growth and expansion. World economies and customers are shopping online to save money and get a whole range of products and services at highly affordable prices. While, the whole concept of online shopping is still finding new and new admirers each day, this whole economy is greatly influenced, supported and promoted by the webshops.

When customers are shopping online, they have to be able to see product designs and lines to choose from, add to their list of liking and finally make a payment to complete the order. Webshops are nothing but a virtual shopping place for the users, where they can search for products, add them to their wish list or shopping carts, and proceed to make bill payments through secure billing desks. Webshops or shopping carts account for the customer's feedback and expectations and satisfaction when it comes to online shopping.

Best Magento Stores

Magento is open source e commerce solution where you can create online stores. Magento offers you to generate store for different things to sell over one website. You can create several store and store views pointing different customer groups. Store views are mainly used for different languages. If you want to build website focusing two different countries, you can have an option to change language for specific customers according to their local. You can use different themes and layouts for different store views.

At the time of globalization, you can sell same products to different customers adding more convenient options for them. Different places have different situations and therefore prices and product features changes accordingly. It is the opportunity to sell those products from one website rather than having two separate websites.

Magento is one of the popular open source platform for web development in present time and flexible apparatus in building efficient website. Magento Templates have most excellent designs to construct an online shop. Magento is also be used in redesigning existing online store. It has already fulfilled the requirements of e commerce community and still adding lot more to it.

Best Magento Themes

Best Magento Themes

Themes are the combination of layout templates and skin files, Magento gives you an opportunity to have multiple themes while having one store. Operating different store using single website URL can have different themes. You can customize it according to the customer demands. Most premium magento themes providers provide source of the themes that includes PSDs, fonts etc.

Magento also offers to have non default theme for seasonal changes. These themes are created for short period of time to get seasonal business online. You can have a range of themes by colors and layouts. The themes are SEO- friendly and can be created in multiple languages.

Magento Modules

Magento is a feature-rich open-source E-Commerce solution that offers merchants complete flexibility & control over the look, content, and functionality of their online store. Completely scalable and backed by an extensive support network, Magento offers companies the ultimate e-commerce solution. Magento module extends the features and functionality of your online Magento store.

Features of Magento Templates

It gives total control over the site and functionality as per the user convenience. The best part of moving from an ordinary style website to an eye catching and effective website is the chance of getting variety of designs according to user needs. There is a wide range of templates available to choose from. All the templates from magento are developed by professional developers and are also customizable if needed. Promotional and marketing tools would be the great features to increase business revenues. It allows globalization to your business. The magento online store can be created for getting business around the world. It has a stunning facility to have more than one online store in different languages. This means you can create you business boundaries without having worries. These stores can be accessible from just one URL easily manageable.

All these factors are the beneficiaries for your business. More on that, whole website is developed SEO-friendly. All the pages will have chance to be listed near to pick points in the search results e.g. Google, MSN, yahoo, AOL, Bing.

How to Setup an ECommerce Webshop - III

5. Loading Products onto the Site

So now you've got your server and it works with your domain name and you've loaded your software what's next?

You've probably got a few hundred (or thousand) products to load up onto the site. Firstly you'll need a digital camera, because you'll need to take pictures of all of your products that are unless you're very lucky and the product's manufacturer can supply you with these.

First you should try to work out a category hierarchy, usually the Webshop software will allow an unlimited number of categories for you to group your products under. Don't forget that your customers will use these categories to navigate your website so it's a good idea to spend some time on planning this properly, then for each product you'll need to come up with a description that you need to type in using the software you've purchased and you need to upload the picture that you've taken.

Once that's done your newly added products will be on your website.

6. Receiving Customer Payments

Obviously you'll need some way of getting the customers payments into your bank account.

Paypal is very good for this as they accept most of the major credit cards and bank cards and it's usually quite straightforward to set up in most Webshop software applications. For the customers its not quite so simple and I find that a lot of customers don't have a Paypal account and really cant be bothered with the validation that they need to go through to set one up i.e. they are just looking for the box where they enter their credit card number.

There are many other very good Credit Card payment providers around who offer payment methods and generally it just a case of finding a payment provider who can process payments to your bank account and work with your software, as the communications between the Webshop software and the payment provider can be quite complex.

How to Setup an ECommerce Webshop - II

3. E-Commerce Software

Now that you have your domain name and you have your server (or hosting service) and the two works correctly together you need to consider which eCommerce webshop software to run, as mentioned previously there are two main directions to go in i.e. you could either decide on Windows or Linux Once you've made the decision of the operating system then you have a huge choice of the different Webshop software and these can range from free software (with limited support) through to software which costs thousands of pounds per year.

There are some very good free applications available such as Magento Webshop and OsCommerce but generally with these you'll be on your own when it comes to installing and running the software.

You'll then need to install and configure your software to get it looking exactly the way that you want it to. As well as the layout you will probably also need to do things like setup your payment methods, delivery options, countries that you want to deal with and tax codes.

4. Site Security

There are two aspects to this -

1. You need to prevent your site from being hacked and your customer's details from being stolen. In the UK generally you need to be registered under the data protection act which sets certain standards on how the data is protected.

2. You also need to make sure that whenever your customers type in sensitive data such as passwords or credit card numbers that there is a layer of encryption between your customer's PC and your web server, so that nobody can be watching the data which is being routed to your server to capture the credit card numbers etc. To make this happens you need to make sure that your server can support an SSL connection and you need to purchase and install a certificate onto the server which will re-assure your customers that this secure connection is happening.

How to Setup an ECommerce Webshop - I

You've made the decision to set up your own Webshop and you've got the products that you want to sell but how do you go about it? Where do you start?

There are several different aspects that you need to consider, the main ones are -

1. Domain Name

To go back to basics a domain name is the name by which your site is known on the web, when you type in the www address of the website that you want to visit you are typing in that site's domain name.

To have your own Webshop you must first purchase your own domain name, then you need to associate that domain name with a physical ip address on the internet, which leads me nicely onto.

2.Hosting the Site

The software for your Webshop needs to physically reside on a computer which can be accessed via the internet, once you've chosen your software it needs to be running 24 hours a day on a computer somewhere.
Here you have the choice of whether you run your Webshop on a dedicated server or you can share space on a server with other websites. But whatever you choose you also need to be able to associate your domain name with the physical (ip address) of your server i.e. the dns settings, this would normally be managed by whoever registered the domain name for you but you do need to be careful with this as it could badly affect the smooth running of your Webshop, its really important that whenever somebody types in your domain name (url) that your website is ALWAYS available.

You also have the choice of whether to run on a Linux Server or a Windows Server, in general there are more options available for Linux and as another generalization software for Linux is available at a lower cost than Windows software, but as in all things though there are exceptions and there is some very good windows software available at competitive prices.

You also need to make sure those things like database backups are taken care of and that you can load site certificates etc.