What is the catch with group buying websites?

Group buying sites are not something new in the online environment; you sign up for a free daily email and receive different discounted offers from local businesses promoting their products through this type of websites. Sometimes the discounts reach crazy amounts like “80% off” so this is usually a best deal indeed. The discounted products range from laser hair removal to clothes, food and so on and one of the major players in this field is the well-known Groupon.

Groupon is believed to be the fastest growing company ever, reaching over 5 million users in United Kingdom only and tens of millions worldwide. Groupon features different discounted offers, the users enter their payment details and once the minimum accepted number of people have signed up for that deal you receive the voucher by email.

As simple as it may sound, Groupon had some problems in the past when The Advertising Standards Authority banned some misleading adverts, however Groupon officials claim they are closely working with the ASA in order to stay under their guidelines in the future. Other problems are related to customers having problems redeeming their discounts, but as in any business there are negative voices and positive ones as well, just that the first ones tend to have a longer echo in the online environment.

Groupon is not the only website in this niche though, names like LivingSocial or Groupola being among its top competitors and lately it seems that Google and Facebook figured out they could fit great in this business and claim a piece of the profits for themselves. But competition is nothing but good for customers therefore larger discounts are to be expected in the future from sites in this business.

Although small businesses entering partnerships with the group buying websites must definitely cut their prices for being accepted, it seems it really worth while they can address to a new group of customers, customers that once satisfied by a service/product can definitely come back for more and thus increasing a certain business’ sales.

Skin your ecommerce software free courtesy of Boss Cart

Premium shopping cart software

For existing online merchants and those thinking of creating their first ecommerce software powered website alike, Boss Cart has just announced the release of a new template called ‘Futuristing’ apart from the template being extremely well design and and attractive, the icing on the cake for online trader wishing to start a phone shop or any other ecommerce website in the technology niche is the fact that the template is completely fee.
The boss cart futuristic ecommerce template was created for Boss Cart Premium but with minor modifications, it can be ported into other ecommerce shopping cart application such as Actinic, Zen Cart, Mangento and other online shopping cart software.

You can find detailed information on the futuristic shopping website template as the shopping cart template section of Boss Cart ecommerce website. Other features of the template apart from its swanking design follows:
- It uses CSS to maximise standards compliance
- It comes with PSD files so that you can make modifications easily.
- Easy to port to other ecommerce shopping cart websites
- Install on Boss Cart Premium without any modification
- Standards complaint

You are free to comment on this post right here at Temi or you can discuss it at UK webmaster forum. We would like to hear from you on ecommerce and other online trading related issues. You can submit your template, shopping cart and other webmaster related products or services for review at temi.co.uk.

Next week we bring you review of McAfee site security and PCI compliance verification services. Ensuring your ecommerce site is PCI compliance can help you keep the terms of your credit card merchant services.

Beginners Guide to Selling Online – eCommerce Made Simple

Beginners Guide to Selling Online

The less than promising outlook for the economy coupled with the gloomy jobs outlook makes starting a small business one of the best ways to weather the gloomy economic outlook that seem to be one of the few things most top economist agree on. Echoing a similar line, the Universities minister David Willetts advice students leaving university to to cast off “old-fashioned” ideas about what constitutes a graduate job and instead consider starting a business.

Knowing you want to start a small business or being urged to start a small business by a government minister and the reality on the ground when you think of the whys and the wherefores of starting a small business is quite different. First you need to identify a gap in the market that you business can fill, you have to convince the banks (which at present are not lending that much to small businesses) to finance you business idea which in an uphill struggle at the prevailing economic climate. Given the impossible huddles you must jump through to establish a traditional small business, starting an online business is a much better and far easier alternative.

The Basics of Selling Online

One of the easiest and the cheapest ways to start a small business is by giving the traditional start up model a wide berth, you cut out the long winded business proposals and endless meeting with bank officials and the routine rejection application for start-up loan tends to get by starting an online business.
Ecommerce based business tends to be easy and much cheap to setup. This article is not an exhaustive guide to starting an ecommerce website but it lists the basics of starting an ecommerce website including everything you need to start making money online.

Starting an online business can be divided into three parts:

1. Choosing an ecommerce shopping cart
2. Choosing a payment processing company
3. Search engine marketing for your business

Choosing a shopping cart
There are hundreds of shopping cart ranging from the cheap and cheerful to deluxe shopping cart that will set you back several thousands, you can also have a bespoke shopping cart created for you, bespoke shopping carts do not come cheap. It will be assumed that capital is tight hence you want to get the best shopping cart possible for as little cash outlay as possible.
The first shopping cart that comes to mind are the free one but given that free shopping carts tends not to have technical support you can call on when you need help, and aspiring small business owner who is not a techie should steer well clear of free shopping cart.
One of the best shopping cart you can start you online shop with is Boss Cart.

Choosing a payment gateway

Hi-tech credit card to combat online fraud – Visa CodeSure

eCommerce Card Fraud – Visa CodeSure to the rescue

Giving all the anti-fraud mechanism put in place by banks and credit card companies, you would think online fraud and credit card fraud will be a thing of the past. Card fraud seem to behave like a badly laid carpet underlay, you push the air out in one end and it pops up at another end. At least on the credit card front, a new Hi-tech card by Visa seem set to dramatically reduce credit card fraud if not eliminate it outright.

The new Visa card comes with a built in keypad and LCD screen, the new card is called Visa CodeSure. CodeSure is exactly the same size as a standard credit card but it features a tiny screen above the signature strip and 10 pressure keypads which card owners can use to input pin number.

Visa CodeSure has undergo extensive trials in Europe, Visa is not confident enough that the it is giving the banks the go ahead to start rolling it out to their customers very soon. Visa CodeSure will replace the cumbersome card reader that is in current use, instead of carrying a card and a card reader, you have it all rolled into one small credit card. The main security feature of the new card is the fact that it generates random authorisation code for each transaction instead of inserting preprepared password which is the way the current Verified by Visa system works. Visa CodeSure is expected to replace verified by Visa system once the roll out of the new card is completed.

Verified by Visa is said to have help online card fraud continue to fall, last year, £266 million was lot to card fraud which was a reduction of 19% over loses due to fraud the previous year.

Sell online with free ecommerce template and Zen Cart

There is over 10 million people in the UK without Internet connection, what is worst is that there are also a significant number of businesses without any form of online presence. Such businesses are lost a lot of potential revenue by not selling online.  One of the reason some small businesses cited for now having online shop is the cost of selling online. The fact is that it has never been cheaper to sell online. There is a number of shopping carts one can basically install and start selling on without any cost, to make it even easier, there are free templates as well to make the free shopping cart look different from thousands of other sites that probably use the default template free ecommerce cart are shipped with.

Free ecommerce template

Velnet has just announced the release an interiors decoration themed ecommerce templates. The template was originally designed for Boss Cart premium but with basic modification, it can be changed to be a stand alone online shop template, modified and ported into other shopping cart such as Zen Cart.

Technical Specification

Though you do not need any technical skills to install the free shopping cart template but for the more technical webmaster, technical details of the free shopping cart template follows:

Sources Available: .PSD;.CPT;.CSS;.PHP
Software Requirements:
- Boss Cart 1.5.9;
- Adobe Photoshop CS+;
- Adobe Dreamweaver 8+ (or any php-editor);

The package comes compressed, to uncompress it you need:
- WinZip 9+ (Windows);
- Stuffit Expander 10+ (Mac)
- gZip (Linux/Unix)
Template Width: 955px
Colors: Gray, Blue, Green, Orange

You can download the template from here.

Next Page »