Qubit Technologies Blog

We weigh the merits of ready-made and custom solutions to add ecommerce to your site.
In our last Tips we cautioned that just having a shopping cart on your website isn’t enough to make ecommerce work. This month we’ll weigh the merits of ready-made and custom solutions to set up ecommerce on your site.

IT ISN’T ROCKET SCIENCE ANYMORE

There was a time when selling products online required months of conjuring by highly-paid programmers. Those days are gone. Large companies with complex requirements still need custom programming (to tap a mainframe for inventory information, for example). But for the vast majority of small businesses there’s a ready-made solution.

Be wary of web programmers who propose to spend a large number of hours building a shopping cart. Either they’ve done this before and are trying to charge you full price for something they already developed, or worse, they’ve been living under a rock for the past five years and have never done an ecommerce site.

ADDING ECOMMERCE TO AN EXISTING SITE

If you already have a website, the first thing you should do is check the ecommerce solutions your web host offers. You may already have a solution available, or you may be able to pay a small upgrade fee to access one.

If you have a website with a list of your products online, you may try a shopping-cart-only service, such as 1ShoppingCart (www.1shoppingcart.com). This type of service lets you add “buy now” buttons to your existing web catalog. When a buyer clicks the button, she’s taken from your website to a checkout area on the ecommerce provider’s site.

This can be a quick and easy way to set up a shopping cart. A mid-range account with 1ShoppingCart costs $40 per month. The downside is that, although you can add your own logo, the checkout area doesn’t look exactly like your site. This may discourage some buyers.

CREATING A NEW SITE WITH ECOMMERCE

There are a variety of web-based services which provide a complete shopping cart and product catalog system. Yahoo Store (store.yahoo.com) is a good example. For $50 per month and 0.5% of each transaction (that’s in addition to whatever you pay your credit-card processing company) you get a fairly complete package.

You choose from a variety of templates and then set up your store. It takes about 1/2 hour if you have copy and digital product photos. One benefit of a Yahoo storefront is inclusion in their ecommerce directory. It’s like opening a store in a mall that already has good traffic. The downside? Although it is possible to customize a Yahoo store, it may end up looking a bit “cookie-cutter” and unprofessional.

CUSTOMIZING A READY-MADE SOLUTION

For the most professional look and feel you’ll want to hire a web development firm to customize a pre-built ecommerce system. Some web firms work with Miva Merchant (www.miva.com). Another example is Resolve Digital’s REDiSHOP module. Costs are higher than a Yahoo store: a license is typically $500 – $1,000 and web development can range from around $2,000 to $10,000.

The advantage of this approach is that the firm uses pre-built functionality so you don’t pay to reinvent the wheel. Your money will be spent on those aspects of the site which are unique to you– professional graphics, layout, and branding– all of which can increase consumer confidence in your site.

SETTING UP A MERCHANT ACCOUNT

A merchant account enables your website to accept credit card orders in real time. Customers enter credit card information and funds are deposited in your account automatically. Firms such as Charge.com provide this service fairly inexpensively.

Your credit must be approved and you have to pay setup, monthly, per-transaction-fixed, and per-transaction-percentage fees. These are generally around $200, $25, $.20, and 2.5% respectively. If you look around you may find a provider running a special and waiving the setup fee.

Most ecommerce systems offer a preferred merchant account vendor. If the prices are within the range noted above you might as well go with that to minimize setup. You can also get a merchant account through your bank, but it’ll be more expensive.

CONCLUSION

If you’d like to test the waters of ecommerce inexpensively, a service like Yahoo may be your best option. If you want to present a more professional face to the public, hire a firm to develop your site by customizing a pre-built ecommerce product. And remember, avoid anyone who wants to build you a shopping cart system from scratch.

RSS feeds can help keep you up-to-date on news, information and blog posts, making you more knowledgeable and productive, both at work and at home. According to Technorati as of March 2006, there are more than 30 million RSS feeds available. Most mainstream news and information sites publish RSS feeds.

There are a number of different use cases for RSS since both internal (enterprise applications, blogs, reports) and external (industry news, competitive information, blogs) content can be delivered as feeds. In particular, many businesses see benefits by not having to periodically check Web sites for key updates or wade through traffic on e-mail distribution lists. In addition to increasing knowledge and productivity, RSS feeds can also be used for brand monitoring, crisis communications, internal/executive communications and competitive intelligence.

Media Companies and Other Content/Information Providers, RSS feeds offer readers, visitors and customers a convenient way to read and access their information. RSS feeds can also be incorporated into Web sites to offer a more personalized and rich user experience, strengthen the brand and maximize revenue opportunities.

To view RSS feeds, you will need an RSS reader or aggregator. There are a number of free or low-cost online, desktop, mobile and Outlook–based readers available. To leverage RSS for a large number of users inside of a company, you will likely need an RSS server to handle security and scalability issues, centrally manage users and groups and present a common interface. To aggregate RSS into an external Web site, you will also need a server-based solution, either hosted or customer-premise based.

RSS and ECOMMERCE

Many online retailers like NewEgg.com are utilizing R.S.S. feeds to keep there customers coming back. If you visit NewEgg.com you will see R.S.S. icons near the sites’ products, with messages offering users regular updates on those products. Once a user has indicated a preference for, say, LCD monitors or daily specials, he clicks on the icon telling the company to send the alerts to his personalized page.

If the user directs NewEgg.com to deliver alerts to a My Yahoo page, NewEgg.com will send the alert, typically an item description with a photo, only when it has a new product or a promotion relevant to the specified items.

Customers might not expend the energy to surf through all the merchandise to find items of interest each time they visit. But R.S.S. is a way to basically position highly relevant interest in front of consumers.

Retailers who are employing R.S.S. feeds are ahead of the curve, but not unreasonably so. It’s still a little too early for this to catch on widely, but as something for the future, it can be incredibly rewarding and potentially very lucrative for retailers.

If you are interested in more information about RSS for your company, Bizatomic boosts your site optimization by creating RSS feeds containing top search engine keywords and adding them to your website. Placing “keyword-targeted” feeds on your webpages will greatly enhance your ability to achieve optimum keyword density. A news feed is preferable to a search engine feed for SEO because news feeds are updated more frequently.