Ecommerce has its ups and downs just like most other things in life. Knowing the ropes will help ensure that you experience more ups than downs when it comes to your ecommerce endeavors. Let’s take a look at a few common problems experienced by those who sell products and services via the internet:

1. Customers can’t figure out how to pay— Is your checkout process confusing or complicated? Low-cost website hosting plans sometimes come with limitations that are hard for the not-so-tech-savvy entrepreneur to overcome. These limitations sometimes contribute to a poor buyer checkout process. As one frustrated buyer puts it, “I finally gave up on contributing to my favorite charity online because it’s just too hard to give them money!” If your website technology limits you, do a simple fix like placing a shopping cart icon or a “buy” link on essential pages. You could also include a text box or quick audio or video that walks a visitor through the buying process.
2. Your buying process is too long. A checkout process that seems to take forever is as disastrous as one that confuses the buyer. Visitors expect to fully complete the checkout process within one to two minutes of their start time. If your checkout process is more like an inquisition, you’re bound to have more visitors who abort the buying process than those who complete it. The person who is buying a one-time gift may not want to become a “member” or receive emails from you for the next two years. Give them the quick checkout option. If they love what you offer, they’ll be back.
3. Your shopping cart doesn’t provide enough payment options. You could be losing sales if you only allow your buyers to pay one way. Study the buying trends of your market so that you’ll know what buying terms and methods suit them best. It won’t benefit you very much to limit your payment method to American Express cards if you serve a market that primarily uses Visa and MasterCard debit cards. You’re better off providing your visitors with more than one way to complete their order.
4. Your purchase confirmation process is generic or incomplete. Your “thank you” page or confirmation email should be detailed enough that the buyer will not feel the need to call you right away. You will also want to do everything you can to eliminate the fear that they have just become a victim of fraud. It’s easy to know if you’ve made this mistake. Take a look at the number of canceled or disputed transactions you have.  Disputes from unhappy customers could jeopardize your status with your payment processor. An easy ecommerce rule to remember is “tell them what they’re buying and then tell them what they bought.” This way you can be certain that they understand what they get for the money. If you are selling a seminar or digital media, be sure to provide additional details that clearly explain what the buyer can expect or will want to do next.
5. Broken links – Nobody likes to click on a link and have it go nowhere. Worse yet is the experience of clicking on a link and being taken to the wrong place. Take a moment to test and then re-test every page or link you publish. If you communicate via email frequently, set up a test account on every major email account client so that you have a chance to see what your list sees. An email that looks great on Cox may not look so good to an AOL recipient. Knowing this in advance will allow you to choose a format that works well for all email clients.

The world of ecommerce can be fun and exciting when you know what to do. Making the time to take note of what is working for the ecommerce veterans in your industry, may be just what you need to keep your head in the game

E-commerce web hosting solutions are designed specifically for the online business owner and most of them will be able to accommodate your site’s needs. However, there are some very basic differences between each plan, and these differences need to be scrutinized carefully. Without knowing the importance of each feature, it can be difficult to prioritize and make a decision based on performance. Instead, most customers choose their ecommerce hosting plan based on price and popularity.

Basing your decision on these factors is a poor decision, because in the need you still don’t know what you’re paying for. Ecommerce hosting solutions are supposed to be all-inclusive packages that help your online business thrive, yet many of them are basic packages that only provide frustration and a long learning curve.

Although the popularity of a web hosting company is a good indicator of it’s service, basing your decision solely on price and popularity will almost always result in mishap, and in the end the performance of your hosting endeavors will suffer. In the world of ecommerce hosting, there are several main attributes that comprise the performance of a particular plan: Reliability, Features, and Cost Effectiveness.

Reliability

Perhaps the most important attribute an ecommerce hosting company can have is the reliability and support it provides. Without proper support you could find yourself dealing with confusing dilemmas on your own. This can result in loss of time and money, and even downtime for your website. When it comes to testing the reliability of a web hosting company, you should take the initiative yourself, rather than relying on the opinion of others. Make a few phone calls to the customer service department and ask a few questions. This way you can see how long it takes them to address your issues, how friendly they are, and how knowledgeable their service representatives are.

Some companies may require you to have an account with them before they provide customer service, however you can always make an inquiry about their services, which will serve the same purpose. Only once you’ve tested the customer service for yourself should you rely on the opinions of others. Customer reviews on forums may be helpful, but you don;t want to base your decision solely on this information.

Features

All good ecommerce hosting plans should include a variety of features that make your job as an online business owner easier. Although there are many features to consider, the only one that should be noted here is the shopping cart. Shopping carts make the shopping experience more convenient for your customers, which ultimately translates into more sales and a greater return on your investment. Without a convenient shopping experience, many of your customers will leave your site and find another online business to spend their hard earned money with.

Cost Effectiveness

While price should not be a deciding factor, you also want to make sure you aren’t overpaying for a solution that may prove to be incapable in the long term. Be sure to compare the cost effectiveness of each ecommerce solution before making your decision. If you notice that a particular company is charging more than another, then make sure you understand why the price is higher. If there is no logical explanation for the raise in price, then they may be overcharging you, which is a good indicator that they are not a trustworthy business.

Every online business needs a good shopping cart to facilitate all of their e-commerce transactions. Most of the time the products or services you sell will not be the deciding factor in regards to the success of your business. Rather the methods in which you market and distribute those products and services is what will ultimately determine the productivity of your business. A good shopping cart will enhance your customer’s overall experience and will prompt them to return for more convenient e-shopping at a later date. A poor shopping cart solution will only give the customer frustration and dis-satisfaction, prompting them to seek the very same products and services you offer elsewhere. When considering an e-commerce hosting service, it is best to look for the following qualities in an online shopping cart.

Up-Selling Capabilities

If you have worked in the restaurant or sales industry in the past, then you are probably familiar with the concept of up-selling. Up-selling is the practice of offering additional products or services to a customer based on their original search criteria or purchases. For example, if an individual is about to purchase an MP3 player, then an appropriate up-sell would be to recommend a set of headphones to go with the MP3 player. Many shopping carts offer this kind of feature in a n automated fashion, allowing the webmaster to create groups of related products that can be sold together. These groups of products are then used to create recommendations for the customer at checkout time. This kind of feature will not only enhance the convenience of your customer’s shopping experience, but it will also increase your sales revenue as well!

User Reviews

Most customer’s are more inclined to buy a product or service when they see that previous customer’s have been satisfied with it in the past. Customer confidence is a crucial aspect in encouraging the sales of your products, and there is no better way to establish trust than through genuine user reviews. A good shopping cart will allow your customer’s to view reviews of the product they are purchasing, thereby prompting them to complete the sale. It is also optimal to have a shopping cart that encourages new customers to leave their own reviews.

Search Engine Optimization

Search engine optimization is a crucial aspect in the promotion of any online business. Quality content and keyword density is the most common method of  search engine rankings, however the importance of a good shopping cart should not be overlooked. A good shopping cart will automatically create keyword rich URL’s for you products or services, thereby enhancing your site’s search engine optimization.

Coupons

Most people who shop online are looking for the best prices available. There are many sites online that are solely devoted to offering coupons for products and services. If you are selling one of these products and services then it is crucial that your site have a shopping cart with coupon capabilities. There is no telling how much business you may lose by bot allowing your customer’s to use coupons.

Open-source software has really made a name for itself in recent times, now prevalent in the form of multimedia players, operating systems and web applications.  In fact, companies around the world are leveraging this type of software to maintain their day to day business operations.  Open-source programs can suite a variety of needs across a broad range of industries and market segments.  One area this software has truly settled into is e-commerce, in particularly, the shopping cart.

Open-source shopping cart software offers a cost effective alternative to traditional commercial solutions.  Perhaps the biggest draw to these programs is that they provide the online merchant with the ability to customize the software to satisfy the unique requirements of their business.  This is all made possible active communities that make templates, modules and various other components widely available in addition to their continuous efforts to enhance the project.

What to Look for

When shopping for any software, open-source or proprietary, it is important for merchants to thoroughly research and evaluate the product before sending it into deployment.  Because there is no single solution that works for every store, it is crucial to select a cart based on individual needs.   With that said, here some critical features you want to look for in an open-source product:

Product Capacity - An online store owner must be able to determine limitations for their product capacity.  For instance, if you have a catalog compromised of more than 500 products but the shopping cart only supports 200, you should know right then and there that the software cannot suit your requirements.  The good thing is that most open-source shopping carts offer support for an unlimited number of products.

System Performance – A lagging, sluggish online store is one of the fastest ways to send your customers surfing to the competition.  For this reason, you need to perform due diligence to make sure your shopping cart delivers an optimal performance.  A lot of this depends on server configuration, but the software itself should definitely be evaluated for performance before you make the final decision.

Community Support – An open-source shopping cart usually comes with no official form of technical support or customer service, which essentially means that there is no hotline to call up whenever you experience problems.  Therefore, you need to find a piece of software that is backed by a strong community of developers and users who solidly back the project.  While the quality of support can never be guaranteed, it is still a good idea to check online in the appropriate forums to access the atmosphere and measure how long it takes for users to generate a response.

Payment Gateway Compatibility – If you want to be able to accept and process credit and debit card payments, then you will need an open-source solution that supports third-party payment gateways.  Although this needs to be considered in your research, it should be comforting to know that many open-source shopping carts are compatible with the major payment gateway service providers.

A quick Google search online for e-commerce solutions will garner a huge number of software solutions available for free or commercial use.  Among the free solutions available, and slowly losing its initial popularity, is osCommerce.  osCommerce is an extensive and quite possibly one of the most thorough out-of-the-box pieces of software you can find.  However, as all-encompassing as it may be, it is in severe need of a major overhaul to place it at the same level as its peers.

How it all began

osCommerce got its start in March of 2000.  Created by Harald Ponce de Leon and originally called “The Exchange Project”, osCommerce quickly began to grow in both initial popularity and capabilities.  The software is created with PHP and uses MySQL for its database core.  It can be installed on any server that utilizes these two pieces of programming.  For the past nine years, the program has been in the development stage.  Officially, as of March 2009, osCommerce released its production ready alpha product.  This release, Merchant V 3.0, includes a template system, an object-oriented backend and the ability to define the administration user name and password upon installation.  To date, the osCommerce site claims over 12,000 online stores currently using their product.

The current problems

While it is a very good and all-encompassing shopping cart program, osCommerce is not without its issues.  Installation of the program by a novice may prove to be a daunting task as a basic knowledge of MySQL as well as other web server technologies should be at the ready.  The default SSL option is initially and automatically set to “no” which is practically an open door to nefarious entities trying to gather secure information on customers.  Adding new shopping cart products is no simple task either – there are several options and features that need to be dealt with before adding in a new product, quite possibly the quickest way to creating a lot of confusion.  When you do have the program installed and your cart up and running with all of its products, adding any additional modules or templating takes quite a bit of work and may end up breaking the core of the program.  Not to mention the creators of the software do explicitly state that additions to the core are not always endorsed.

One of the best ways to avoid a lot of this hassle is to either have a seasoned osCommerce professional install the program for you or, if your web host has this option, have it installed by your hosting company.

Conclusion

If you are in need of a shopping cart program that is capable of being search engine optimized, fully featured and very robust, osCommerce is a good choice.  However, it still needs quite a bit of work in as far as installation and add-on capabilities before it can be considered a simple ecommerce program of choice.  OsCommerce is ideal for the knowledgeable and seasoned web developer, not for the novice nor the faint of heart.