If you're planning on opening your own online store, you should
make sure that you learn all about e-commerce, so that you can
select the best online store builder for your business. One big
decision you want to make early on is whether you want your
online store to consist only of a shopping cart, or if you want
your online store to be your entire site, with shopping cart
functionalities available to every page. Let's look at the
options.
Ecommerce Option One: Complete Online Store
Software that creates a complete online store for you, with
completely integrated ecommerce capabilities, is arguably best
for new websites, since it will save you the trouble of buying
separate content management software and then integrating it
with your current site.
Here are some things you can do with a completely
ecommerce-enabled web store that you can't do with a traditional
website that just has a CMS attached:
* Show a "in your shopping cart" list of selected items to users
who add something to a cart, then continue browsing your site.
Studies have shown that "shopping cart abandonment," in which
users add something to the cart and then forget about it while
browsing the site, is greatly reduced when users can see their
shopping cart contents in front of them at all times.
* Feature a different product on your homepage each day,
rotating based on a dynamic selection from your shopping cart
inventory.
* Automatically recommend a brand new product to users who are
browsing a related page on your site-without updating the code
on that page.
* Remind returning visitors to your homepage of an item they
added to a shopping cart on a previous visit but did not
purchase.
* Manage your entire website's look and feel, including both the
regular pages and the shopping cart pages, from a single
interfaces, without having to copy changes in design from one to
the other.
* Automatically remove a product featured on regular pages of
your site when it is no longer in stock.
* Show an updated list of the latest additions to your inventory
on the homepage or other non-shopping-cart pages.
* Display a signup form for users to receive email announcements
of new products, dynamically generated from your web store.
Ecommerce Option Two: Separate Shopping Cart
If you already have a website, transferring everything to a new
web store system can be daunting. You may want to start your
foray into ecommerce with a simple add-on shopping cart.
But don't limit your possibilities for the future. You can still
employ a full-featured web store now and simply use only its
shopping cart functions. Simply set up the online store to show
in a directory or subdomain of your existing domain, or host it
off-site completely. Then link to the individual product pages
on the web store from your existing site.
Users never have to know the shopping cart is actually a
full-featured site with its own homepage-they'll never see those
pages, and in many web store software packages, you can simply
disable those pages from every being created.
After all, on the web you don't have to buy a bigger building to
expand your store. Why limit your growth with
less-fully-featured software? Choose ecommerce software that
will grow with your business, and your store can grow as big as
you can make it.
About the author:
Joel Walsh is a writer and online business owner. Check out this
affordable web store :
http://www.easystorecreator.com?%20Ecommerce%20Solutions
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