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.

Win a shopping cart worth £199

One of the ways some online traders have been combating the recession is through additional orders pouring in from new customers outside UK who usually do not buy from UK because of the strong pound. Since the start of the recession, the pound sterling has lost about 30% of its value, at one point it was virtually on par with Euro, making products and services in UK more affordable to EU countries, this lead to some online traders getting additional revenue of up to 35% from the EU.

If you are not already selling online, how about the opportunity for you to win your own ecommerce shopping cart that could help you start selling online within a few hours? UK Webmaster Forum, Webmaster server is offering to give one lucky winner a Boss Cart Premium shopping cart. There is no long-winded entry form, you just need to register at Webmaster Server, visit the win a shopping cart thread, update it and you could be the winner.

It is highly recommended that you visit the forum and win a copy of Boss Cart and start taking advantage or the online retail opportunity that savvy ecommerce merchants have been taking to increase their sale in this recession.

eCommerce the only safe haven in recession?

The unprecedented turmoil in the British economy has seen ’safe’ institutions like Banks nationalised (another word for saying administration?), picture of UK High street landscape redrawn with names that has been there for decades such as Woolworth and Virgin Mega stores omitted from the new picture.  Also for the first time in over a decade, UK unemployment has reached and exceeded two million with another one million people expected to be out of work within the next 12 months.

Whatever sector of the economy you look things seem to be on a downward trend with the exception of ecommerce. Online shopping not only bucks the downward trends on the High street but it did it with double digits; 13%. The latest figures about the e-tail sector released by online retail research group IMRG Capgemini. IMRG added that  February online shopping fell 11% from the month before, the monthly drop was down to enhanced sales in January, which was the result of  continuing post-Christmas sales.
The report also said that  online sales of beers, wines and spirits were up 30% on January and a surge of sales was recorded  in the few days before Valentine’s Day on 14 February.

The increase in online sales is expected to keep bucking the trend for the rest of this year, it was claimed in some quarters that online sales growth would have been much stronger if the rest of the economy is not as weak at it currently is.

Internet shopping rise by 38%

Rising food bill, fuel cost and the credit crunch have forced shoppers to seek out bargains away from the high street, this direct beneficiary of this has been online retailers according to a survey by e-commerce group IMRG and consultancy Capgemini.
The report said that the total Internet spend was £26.5bn, up 38% on the same period last year, which also translate to the fact that online sales have reached nearly 20% of total retail spending.

Cloths and footwear sales on the high street see a sharp drop in sale despite tempting offers from high street retailers. Internet sales of cloths and footwear on the other hand saw a rise, with over all Internet clothing sales rising by 32%, lingerie sales rose 37% and footwear was up 38%.

Year on year, online shopping has been rising faster than traditional high street shopping, Christmas 2007 saw online shopping spend rise to 15.2 billion, with was an increase of 50% over online sales of December 2006.