As an online retailer you need to have a great software shopping environment for your customers to use. Shopping cart software packages come in all shapes and sizes and it is important that you find out which features are essential for your business before you make a purchase. You may not need all of the features that are out there, but how do you decide what bits and pieces are essential for you. This can be hard sometimes, here is a listing of some of the 10 most essential features of a good shopping cart software solution, things that no online merchant should be without.

1. A good shopping cart application should provide a fantastic user experience. Shoppers at your site should be able to show without the need to register as a site user first, this requirement has been know to make potential shoppers abandon shopping at ecommerce sites.

2. You need a package that can calculate the applicable shipping and tax charges for a location and make them known to the buyer as soon as possible in the transaction process.

3. You also need a customisable and flexible relationship between your cart and the rest of your web site. A lot of online shoppers get fed up with shopping carts that do not interact properly with a merchant’s main browsing pages. A ‘return to’ shopping cart that continually updates itself is essential for a streamlined business.

4. An automatic email confirmation feature is the third essential that I will list, as this gives a buyer a sense of confidence and automates the receipt sending procedure.

5. The fourth essential is that the software must use a respected anti fraud solution to help reduce fraudulent transactions.

6. Use third party validators such as ScanAlert or Verisign to keep your safety in check and increase your credibility amongst your customer base.

7. The sixth essential feature in a shopping cart application is the ability for a customer to control and modify the shipping information of their purchase. Studies have shown that a great many transactions are abandoned because a customer is unable to find or modify the delivery information.

8. The seventh feature I will mention is to have software with the ability to use discount codes and voucher codes in the checkout process. These are an increasing promotional tool for online business and even if you are not using them now, you may be in the future.

9. The eighth feature I am listing is to have a cart which a customer can print out or email in order to keep a copy of the transaction. The last two features I will mention may seem obvious but many free and open source shopping carts do not have them included.

10. A shopping cart must include credit card processing, preferably in real time, and also its own integrated payment gateway. Many cheap and free solutions do not offer this and instead use services like Paypal and Google for their gateway, this makes you reliant on other organisations and is much less flexible for you in the long run.

You can find out more about shopping cart and ecommerce at Boss Cart ecommerce software. You can discuss ecommerce related issues at Boss Cart Forums.

Online auction giant, eBay, yesterday announce measures that seem to complete its creeping transformation from a purely auction website to a shopping mall. The new changes will encourage more fixed-price sellers,This new changes is aimed at new customers who are not keen about auctions, just prefer to buy goods at fixed-prices. The move will also encourage larger organisations to have a store on ebay.
At present, ebay said 43% of its global sale revenue  are at fixed prices and growing, revenue from fixed-price item is expected to catch up with revenue from auction eventually.

While openly courting new businesses, especially larger retailer to have and outlet on eBay where goods can be sold at fixed-prices, ebay is also try to keep its army of 170,000 or so sellers happy by cutting list prices of goods but increasing commission on sale, this reverses the recent increases in listing prices which provoked a revolt among many of its sellers.

To assure buyers that eBay is not a den of dodgy Del boy style traders, ebay is increasing its seller protection for people using PayPal from £500 - £30,000.  eBay is undoubtedly the most popular shopping destination for UK Internet bargain hunters, it is claimed that 2 out of 3 online British shopper visits ebay once a month, helping to contribute significantly to ebay £30 billion a year worldwide turnover. It remains to be seen whether its new changes will answer its wall street critics claim that ebay has little room for growth.

You can discuss ebay and other ecommerce related issues at Boss Cart eCommerce forum

E Commerce is the process of buying and selling goods across the internet. Since the internet has universal reach, going beyond physical boundaries and making customers and retailers interact virtually, it has become one of the most sought after sectors by companies, big and small alike.
The most important reason for the success of E Commerce is the fact that it provides an electronic storefront to send and receive payments.

Does E Commerce really work? Yes, it does. It’s beneficial to the consumers as well as the store owners. From the store owner’s point of view, the reach of the product is universal and serves the customer according to their individual needs. From the customer’s point, they save on traveling, fuel, time and get door delivery of everyday goods also.

The money made through e commerce has exceeded more than $1.8 trillion as of 2004. And so, yes, a lot of money is involved in this business. But there are certain tips you must keep in mind while trading through e commerce:

1.    Be original and be creative. Give your customers a reason to visit your site and buy your product. Kindle their curiosity.
2.    Make the customer feel they are important and make sure there are products to suit everyone’s needs.
3.    Include the product in your signature in order to increase traffic to your site when you send them weekly sales letters.
4.    Not to forget, the sales letter must be written by you. This will make you seem more approachable for queries and transactions.
5.    Optimize the search engine. Search engines are the reason for most of the site trafficking.
6.    The most effective way of optimizing is to get accurate keywords so that people are not misled.

find out more information about how to make money from ecommerce at boss cart UK

eCommerce websites are one of the most difficult sites to optimise for search engines. Partly because of the shopping cart application used to develop a site and partly because store owners do not take the time to take the basic steps required to differentiate their online store from other stores using the same shopping cart platform or selling the same goods.
The simple and easy steps below should help you make your site search engine friendly and hopefully help you increase sales.

1. Choose your shopping cart carefully:
If you are not using a bespoke shopping cart, then put a lot of thoughts into choosing a shopping cart. Ensure the shopping cart software you choose is search engine friendly. This means in addition to your product URLs being clean and without parameter passing, each product or at least product categories should have SEO keyword fields for title tag, meta tag, and keywords. If you have you shopping basket created for you, ask your developer to build SEO keyword fields into it.

2. Products and possibly manufacturers name in URL:
When creating your product category and sub categories, try to arrange it so that product and manufactures name appears in the url, for example:
www.ecommerceshopname.co.uk/uskids/juniorgolfequipment/golfclubs.php .

3. Easy to crawl site navigation:
Ensure your site navigation is created with code search engine crawlers can index. There are some very fancy navigation that makes eCommerce sites look good but cannot be crawled by search engines.

4. Internal site linking:
When linking from one product to another or even one page to another withing your site, use keyword rick anchor text, for example, don’t link to another product like this: thatProduct.php rather like this: golfBalls.php .

5. Do not stuff your homepage title tag:
Most eCommerce site tries to insert keywords of as many of the products they sell as possible, this can be counter productive. You should optimise your homepage title take for two or three of your products. In the body of the page, you can create keyword rich text linking to other pages of your site optimised for that particular product.

6. Optimise your product image:
Simply adding alt tag to images used on your ecommerce site will enhance usability to blind or partially sighted uses and could increase traffic from search engine image search crawlers. You should also give meaningful names to your images, for example call a golf bag image golf bag rather than image 2.

7. Linking from your blog:
If you have a blog as part of your online store, you should link to products you blog about with anchor text that is the product name rather than just saying “more” or “view details” .

8. Create product feeds:
Most modern shopping cart comes with product RSS feeds that enable you to export your products to Google base and other content aggregations such as Haabaa Price.

9. Create RSS feeds for your customers:
Some shopping cart have a product RSS feeds (different from the one in tip number 10) similar to RSS feeds from websites or forums, it enables the customer to monitor latest products as you add them to your site.

10. Create unique product description:
Many online store just copy and paste product description from the manufacturers, its create thousands of duplicate contents. Its important that you reword product description to make yours unique.

You can find more eCommerce optimisation tips, discuss shopping cart, payment gateways and other online store development related potics at UK eCommerce forum section of UK WW.