Your Shop Ideas

How to make a deep impression on customers?

admin — Sat, 18 Jul 2009 10:13:18 +0000

Of course every web site owner climbs to make his/her company popular and attract as much customers as possible. How to do it? The world is so competitive; countless companies provide similar type of products and services. And only the uniqueness of your company can make you outshine your competitors. One considerable way is through creating attractive banners, advertising an organization. It is vital to make a deep impression on customers. People around the world are your potential consumers but they have short-term memory in remembering various companies and they prefer to buy good, that visually attracts them. They remember things more when they see as compared to what they read or what is being told to them.
Making your company visually appealing is essential in your banner ads. Most of the companies use flash banner as their banner design. It is an interactive technology that invites the visitors of the web to take part in the action. It can be used for adding animation to the web pages. Flash MX has gained significance in recent times.

The common purposes of most of the banner ads are:
-Sale of products or services
-To promote a brand
-Increase the number of hits on the website.
Just one obstacle is that nowadays making a flash banner is very expensive.
Banner maker software is a new trend gaining momentum. It provides an array of templates, font options and sizes to pick from that befits all industries. You just need to select a template according to the theme of your website and design a matching flash-based banner speedily. Also it can be done without prior knowledge of Flash. All you have to is to keep following the manual details, add your preferences and the banner design is ready within seconds. A flash Banner maker tool is very promising making the process of banner designing easy and convenient for all the users.

X-Cart installation

Why blogging is so important?

admin — Thu, 16 Jul 2009 19:41:32 +0000

Nowadays blogging is necessary for every business. There are some features like personal writing, instant publishing system, easy updates and simple maintenance that made blogs so popular. Any information about upcoming events, achievements, about goods and services, about innovations can be published on blogs.
When businesses use blogs for these purposes, it appears as a sociable message, rather than a company brochure.
Internal blogs are used to share information within the employees of the organization. They help management to be in good contact with the employees and help to create a healthy relation between management and employees.
Millions of people visit blogs every day so blogging has a great potential to help the organizations in educating their customers, employees, or investors and drive them towards some positive environment. And it helps also to enhance business opportunities.

Using blogs for recruiting has not gained substantial progress yet. But, there is a lot of scope for the blogs to help businesses in recruiting potential candidates. Blogs can also help businesses to engage with candidates who are passionate to work for them.
Blogs are an excellent medium for the businesses to communicate with their customers. Businesses can efficiently reach customers and get feedbacks, tips and reviews from them. This creates a pleasure environment for a strong relationship between the organization and customers.
Many businesses have used blogs successfully in maintaining good communication with the customers and other stake holders. Blogs helped them to build a healthy relationship between management and employees. Corporate blogging is rapidly gaining popularity and the days are not so far for it to become essential as a website for a professional company.

Wordpress & X-Cart integration

Shopping Carts.

admin — Wed, 15 Jul 2009 19:43:11 +0000

There are a lot of shopping carts out there so it is hard to choose which one to use for your web site. Here is some of them: Magento, Oscommerce, CRE Loaded, Zen Cart, X-Cart , OSC Max, Joomla & Virtuemart.

1. Magento is one of the newer shopping carts on the block. The coding is based on the latest PHP 5 object oriented coding standards and the Zend framework.
+ Varian the company who backs the cart is very active in updating the code and fixing bugs, Multi-Store Capable, Nice default template
- Heavily layered coding style requires a lot of time to learn and do customizations, technical documentation is limited, making it difficult to customize and modify the programming of Magento beyond doing graphical changes. Runs fairly slow.

2. Oscommerce MS 2.2 is the basis for both Zen Cart and CRE Loaded. As such is it is simpler and does not have all of the contributions already added that Zen Cart and CRE Loaded do. It runs well though and is a good back to basics shopping cart.
+ Has the most available number of contributions and modifications. Recent security update brings it up to date with MySQL 5 and PHP 5
- It can take a lot of time and money to install all the contributions you want (add-ons). No graphic template system meaning it is harder to modify the design

3. CRE Loaded is like Oscommerce but with many more contributions installed. Some of the nice contributions it has are Easy Populate which lets you populate your database from an Excel file, coupon codes, administrator access levels, template system, and an affiliate manager. CRE Loaded also has one of the Oscommerce templating systems installed which allows you to more easily integrate a design into the system and control which information boxes show on the left and right columns.
+ Many contributions from Oscommerce already installed
- Contributions from Oscommerce.com Can be more difficult to install, but CRE Loaded has many of its own already converted. Buggy code for some modules like multi vendor shipping

4. Zen Cart has a very nice wide array of features based on Oscommerce but has gone its own path. You can not install contributions directly from the Oscommerce web site onto Zen Cart. Some of the nice features include product attributes managers, template system, html editor for regular web page contents, built in coupon code system, ability to select what credit cards you accept, and more. An issue with Zen Cart right now is the Easy Populate contribution which would let you import products from an Excel sheet does not work yet.
+ No licensing fees. Stable. Many contributions from Oscommerce already installed
- Not possible to use Oscommerce contributions, they must be converted to Zen Cart. Admin interface is a little messy in certain areas because there are so many contributions installed.

5. X-Cart is a commercial package, but one of the most competitively priced and easy to modify.
+ Commercially supported and has very few if any bugs. Uses Smarty Templates system which many programmers like to work with for laying out the web site.
- Licensing fees (figure $800 + in just licensing fees not including any web development)

6. OSC Max is an excellent version of Oscommerce that has many useful contributions installed. It is just as easy to use in the admin as the default Oscommerce installation
+ No licensing fees. The contributions installed are very useful. Has wholesale/Reseller pricing module already installed. Well-documented
- Personal preference - you have to separately upload small and large images, but easily fixed by installing on the fly thumbnails module.

7. Joomla & Virtuemart - Installing and configuring Joomla & Virtuemart together was a snap. On the Virtuemart website they have a combined installer that installs Virtuemart with Joomla. This is the solution you would want if you have to have your CMS (Content Management System) combined with your shopping cart. Joomla seems the best CMS out there, but Virtuemart on the other hand is not the best shopping cart system. It is not a bad one though, it is just not as fully featured as the other solutions.

+ Easy to install. Combines well with the best CMS Joomla. Has the basic shopping cart features
- Lacks a lot of high-end shopping cart features. Not as many add-on modules available

X-Cart Developer

New X-Cart Gift Registry module.

admin — Tue, 14 Jul 2009 19:54:33 +0000

Kosmos Central,a Portland-based web solutions company has launched a new X-Cart module that allows store owners to offer their customers gift boxing / gift wrapping for any good or product on their site. For a long time customers have been asking for this option, and finally it was presented. This module is very convenient and gives additional revenue to merchants, especially during the holiday season. There are a lot of occasions in our life: Weddings, Christmas, Birthdays and many others. Gift wrapping is an affordable and effective way to show customers that service is a top priority. In addition to gift boxing, customers will be able to add a personalized message with each box and choose whether to include the pricing tag(s).

The gift registry would allow store owners to give their customers the option to set up a gift registry for various life events and celebrations and send out email announcements regarding their registry to all their friends and family. Other features of the Kosmos Central Gift Registry X-Cart Module include:

1) Creating registry profiles & unlimited number of registries
2) Quickly adding items to your registry & managing/updating registry items
3) Easily setting up gift registry for various life events or celebrations
4) Viewing what items have been purchased from your registry
5) Sending out email announcements & viewing announcement history
6) Sorting registry items by manufacturer, category or price
7) Gift wrapping options and message available upon purchase
8 ) Easily updating any item in registry along with quantities

X-Cart modules

Convenient Shopping

admin — Mon, 13 Jul 2009 19:17:42 +0000

According to the data from the SeeWhy, a company specializing in abandonment tracking software, more than 70% of online shoppers abandon shopping carts before finishing the checkout process. Movement of consumers between competitive retail sites leads to shopping cart abandonment. For on-line sellers it equals lost revenue.
Driving conversion through seamless transaction depends on choosing the right payment management platform. So, what should every merchant consider to improve overall customer satisfaction until the checkout process is complete?
Provide a clean, hassle free user interface. Consumers who feel overwhelmed or under informed are likely to abandon their carts immediately. First, count how many steps are in the checkout process. If completing a transaction takes 10-20 no doubt that consumers will abandon your shop. If you require registration for purchases, consider addressing this step before the user reaches checkout. Don’t force a user to wait for a confirmation email before they check out because it correlates strongly with abandonment rates. Once a consumer decides to buy something, be sure to provide a clear and convenient guide through the checkout process and build confidence along the way.
If you need to collect a large amount of information, make sure to break things up. Make the checkout process less intimidating by separating the required fields into two to three pages. Show the consumer all the costs associated with the purchase either in the first step of the checkout process or in the product description. Specifically, place your shipping rates, return, guarantee, privacy, delivery, customer service and security policies in visible and relevant areas throughout the entire process.
The main reason of cart abandonment is high shipping costs. The survey also found that providing shipping costs up front might have resulted in substantially more customers completing their purchases.
Be sure to include your physical address and contact information at the bottom of every Web page. Usability studies suggest adding “About Us” and “Contact Us” links to build further confidence and trust with the consumer. Ultimately, consumers are less likely to abandon a cart if they are aware of estimated shipping costs and anticipated delivery dates, and if they have an option to call or request live service before they even place an item in their cart.

Protect your images: X-Cart Image Guard Module

Your Business Name.

admin — Fri, 10 Jul 2009 07:29:57 +0000

Sometimes it can be not easy to create a business name when starting a retail business. It doesn’t matter how good your business plan is. If you have an awful name you will fall.
So let’s try to find the way of choosing the perfect business name.
First of all we need sheet of paper and pencil. Write down the goods or service you offer at the top of the page and try to remember as many keywords as you know related to your retail business. After that take the dictionary or thesaurus to find synonyms to continue searching for keywords. You can find there some interesting words that you may not formally use.
Take a minute to think about your business, what is your mission and what do you want to accomplish, how you would like others to view your business. Add it to your list of business ideas.
Look your list through and try to combine words or suggest common sayings, or clichés. Try to create any alliteration, which is a combination of words beginning with the same letter or sound? Also, if any words on your list have a homonym (other words that sound the same but spelled differently) then add it to your list. Try pairing keywords which rhyme or even contradict each other. Remember that your business name must not be misleading or in any way imply something that the business is not.
Your business name has to be easy to understand, spell and pronounce, don’t use negative sounding words. You should be creative and imaginative. Don’t limit your product line by choosing a name that won’t represent all you do and don’t use a strictly generic term, such as ‘discount office supply’ which cannot be protected as trademarks. Create a name you can stand behind.
Now look at your list of possibilities and ask the following questions of each name:
• Is it distinctive and short?
• Is it pronounceable and easy to spell?
• Does it have a positive sound?
• Does it clearly communicate your missive?
Wait for a few days, get feedback from family and friends. Say it repeatedly. And if you feel confident with the name, then it’s a keeper. If you can’t get used to, toss it out and go back to your list.
The name has to exactly tell people what you do or what you sell. A tagline is best described as a phrase or adage that defines your company’s mission in the fewest words possible. Take another look at your list of keywords to see if any words can create a 3-7 word statement about who you are or what you are selling.
From the moment of inception, your business name will be linked to your customers’ perceptions. All advertising will center on your brand. By putting a lot of thought and effort into generating business name ideas now, you may avoid many marketing and legal pitfalls.

X-Cart Runetisation Pack

Colors of your Brand.

admin — Thu, 09 Jul 2009 05:24:36 +0000

Color of your brand is very important aspect. You use it everywhere-in every advertisement, in logos and every piece of communication until that color becomes synonymous with it. So, what colors are associated with Coca Cola, McDonald’s, Snickers, IBM… Of course it doesn’t take a lot of time to answer, everybody knows it.
In human psychology every color has different associations and meanings. The color says a lot about company and the effect it wishes to have on consumers.
Red is a strong, great attention-grabber. It is the color of movement, love, excitement, passion and energy. It is recommended to use this color for logos and to add emphasis to advertisements but for the walls of a restaurant red is unsuitable.

Orange also denotes liveliness and energy, usually it is associated with discounts and low-cost products.
Pink is a tender color. It denotes romance, truth, delicacy and affection.
White is the color of purity, freshness and cleanliness
Black denotes power, authority and mystery. It tends to overwhelm people, so businesses keep its use to a minimum.
Green denotes fertility, generosity, nurturing and stable energy. It is also the color most associated with nature; therefore, green is commonly used for eco-friendly products or services.

Colors like blue, green and pink are soft colors that are calm and restful.

Blue denotes dependability, faith, loyalty, steadfastness and wisdom.
Keep in mind that colors really help consumers remember a business. According to report of the Seoul International Color Expo 92 % of the total respondents said that they put most importance on visual factors when buying products. Only 5 % said that the physical feel via the sense of touch was most important. Hearing and smell each drew 1 %. When asked to approximate the importance of color when purchasing products, 84.7 % thought that color accounted for more than half among the various factors important for choosing products. Research also shows that color increases brand recognition by 80 %; improves readership as much as 40 %; and increases comprehension by 73 %. Color ads are read up to 42 % more than similar ads in black and white and color can be up to 85 % of the reason that people decide to buy.

But the color you choose for your business can also turn into your enemy, especially if you have branches in other countries or your business caters to a particular culture. Colors have different connotations in different countries and cultures and some can be negative. For example, yellow expresses weakness and cowardice in Europe; blue is the color of mourning in Iran; white denotes unhappiness and mourning in India and China and black is the color of mourning and death in Europe and bad luck and evil in Thailand. Therefore, it is important to take such factors into consideration and think twice before choosing a color for your business.

Once you’ve settled on a color for your brand, make sure to incorporate it throughout your advertising plan. Including your brand color or color scheme in all your advertisements, promotional products and publicity campaigns will help in reinforcing your brand so that whenever your customers see your brand color, they’ll think of your brand. The key is consistency.

X-Cart New Products Module

How to Boost Searches for Your Online Store

admin — Tue, 07 Jul 2009 19:18:40 +0000

Unfortunately most of ecommerce businesses can’t give all the sales owners want to get. Sometimes sellers think that if they create an on-line store it will be enough and people will find them and give money. It is a big mistake. If you have an on-line store you have to promote, promote and promote it.
Here is 5 easy ways to add additional content to your website and pick up additional longtail and niche searches.
Everyone should clearly understand one very simple mathematical equation that increasing the visits (qualified leads) will inevitably increase your sales.
How to Boost Searches with Content
These ideas to help you promote your store with content are not completely without effort. It will be great if you sit down and write great content for your visitors

1. Product Reviews: Product reviews are very easy to manage. Most ecommerce software has this ability build in or a modification is available to add it. Biggest issue with this is getting folks to add a review. Some shop owners use a system to ask for them to post it, some make it open for guests to post (ill advised) and then wade through the spam to find good reviews… But our suggestion is far simpler! Just create a nice email master asking customers how their experience in your store went, did the receive their items and by the way can you reply to this email with a review of the product as you see it. Many more will provide a review for you if they can stay within the comfort of their own email screen.

2. Buying Content: Buying content is really a simple matter of buying PLR articles related to your niche OR hiring a copywriter to write for you. Most importantly this content must be unique, so the smart shop owner will not just publish purchased articles, but rather change it up a bit for uniqueness.

3. Forums: While web forums are not the gleaming star they used to be, if your products are very technical or related to a hobby for example… then a forum might just get shoppers writing content for you! Again, this is not easy task to get going, but a well structured and supported forum can supply an incredible amount of user generated content with little or no effort long term to maintain. Again, this would not be a very costly project to develop, but you would have to add content manually for a while and invite your shoppers at every opportunity to get it going.

4. Add a Glossary or FAQ section: Glossaries, dictionaries, FAQs and tutorials are excellent niche content, inexpensive to get going and easy to maintain. Probably the most common for shop owners is a Q&A or FAQ section. Many times this can be accomplished with a simple plugin for your ecommerce software. Our FAQ sections contains questions, answers and tutorials… We used WordPress to build it. Fact is this is very inexpensive to get going and easy to maintain. So when customers ask questions…. answer them and post it.

A web site that grows it content in a sustained pattern over time gets better search engine ranking. You can also use content creation regularity to train the Search Engine Robots to visit your store more often simply by updating your web site content every week. The trick is in the perserverance, so don’t run out and buy 10 articles and publish them all at once, you have far more to gain from publishing them once a week for 10 weeks

X-Cart XML Sitemap Module

How to get a better response in Email Marketing campaign?

admin — Mon, 06 Jul 2009 06:31:56 +0000

If you are interested in how to get more open&clicks, try to test something new or change something small in your email campaigns. Don’t be afraid that this process can take a lot of your precious time. Testing takes just minutes for you to do. You won’t know about how your recipients will respond until you try. So, how to check and test? Here is 5 methods, lets become acquainted with them:

1. Offer - Experiment with a % discount vs. a $10 savings vs. a pricing discount like 20% off. Try a test with paid shipping vs. free shipping or with an expiration date vs. no expiration date. Then roll out to the rest of your list the winning offer.

2. Subject Line - If nobody opens your email, it doesn’t matter how lovely it is on the inside, so why not test two different subject lines? Back to your past campaigns and see what your recipients are clicking on, then include that offer or article in your new subject line. After you send it out compare your open and click rates to see if you got a better response than normal

3. Links – How many links to your offer in your email? If no more than 5 links, try including 5 more and see if your response increases.

4. Format – don’t include a sidebar in your emails, try removing it so that perhaps more of your content is “above the fold” or the part of an email or web page that is visible without scrolling. Make sure you’ve got some links above the fold so you can see if it’s working. If you get more clicks you may want to consider changing your format for good.

5. Images - Try removing images and see if a text version of your email works better. How 90’s of you!
You can either split your list in half and do the test or you can break off a small piece of your list and do the test a day in advance of your real email campaign date. Then roll out to your bigger list with the winner.

One last thing, if you are going to test any of these make sure you test them one at a time so you know which change actually made the difference.

X-Cart modules

Affiliate marketing

admin — Wed, 01 Jul 2009 21:58:21 +0000

What does it mean affiliate marketing? It is different banners, hosting links and product information on a website or blog and then getting paid a flat fee or percentage of a sale whenever visitors click through on these links and make a purchase. Another words affiliate marketing is selling goods or services offered by others and then getting paid for each sale. This marketing program is very convenient for small business. Merchants only pay after the results are delivered. One main advantage is that there is no risk. Using an affiliate marketing program merchants agree to pay their affiliate partners a referral fee for each lead or sale that is generated. There are many affiliate programs available on the Internet today, so it’s important to make stand out and catch the attention of professional affiliate marketers. Once merchants have done that they are good on way to a successful campaign. Here are some ideas on how to make affiliate program stand out from the multitudes that are available:
Once you’ve claimed your niche market research and find web sites that have viewers interested in your niche market. You will want to find partners that have already built traffic and would benefit from your affiliate offer. Your offer should be a win-win for both you and your affiliate partners. Don’t try to sell everything to everyone. It is the quickest way to fail in your adventure. Keep in touch with your partners. Communicate with them by welcoming them to your affiliate program send out updates on product additions or changes. Give them tips and advise on how to be successful in marketing your products. Always pay them on time. Don’t relax if you have a few good partners, you never know when they may decide to leave you. Recruit new partners as many as it possible. You can find new partners by advertising your affiliate program on your web site, listing or advertising in affiliate directories, or by contacting potential affiliates directly. Provide your affiliate partners with creative and promotional material. You want to make their job of marketing your products or services as easy as possible. The less work they have to do and the more conversions they see the more likely they are to promote your products or services.
A good affiliate marketing program takes time to build, but with a bit of effort it has the ability to increase your Internet sales noticeably. It’s worth the effort and it can become on of the best time and financial investments in your marketing plan.