Google Checkout store gadget – shopping cart from Google

Given the fact that Google has been sticking its fingers in every possible pie online, its not grate surprise when Google announce the launch of their shopping cart which they call Google checkout store gadget. Google has been know to lead in online technology but with this new entry level shopping cart they are following. Google checkout store gadget and in fact the concept of Google Checkout is not unlike Paypal and PayPal shopping cart, where Google try to be different is the simplicity and ease of use.

In Google Checkout store gadget API, it is claimed you can have and online store setup and running in under five minutes without any need for coding or technical knowledge.

Google Checkout store gadget as you may have guessed run with Google Checkout so you cannot use it without signing up for Google Checkout first. The process is fairly simple once you have Google Checkout account out of the say. You just list your products in a Google spreadsheet, and then embed your new store in a website. Small, medium, and large sizes are available.

The shopping cart which is still in its beta stages is not robust enough to compare with established shopping carts online, its just away of getting more business for Google Checkout and of course other Google applications.

If you are looking for a robust ecommerce shopping cart software, application like Boss Cart its what you need, apart from giving you the flexibility of using any payment gateways you need, its fully fledged, tried and tested.

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.

eCommerce Shopping Cart Comparison Chart

There is no better time to start online shop than now, whether you are thinking of starting an online shop from scratch,adding shopping cart facility to an existing website or just researching available ecommerce solutions.
The economic climate is quite gloomy for high street retailers but online traders large and small continue to see significant rise in sale, its time to take a serious look at ecommerce if you have not already done so.
The table below brings you brief information on some of the well know shopping basket software on the market today.

	Virtuemart	CubeCart	osCommerce	Zen Cart
Details	Free open-source shopping cart. It works as a stand alone but its at it own when combined with Joomla.	Free and paid options, robust and tested.	One of the most popular if not the most popular free shopping cart	A fork of osCommerce project.It has some features it parent does not like downloadable goods.
Advantages	Quite simple to install, may need to install Joomla to get the full benefit of some functions	Cube Cart is easy to install, support is said to be efficient.	- Easy to install, some hosting company bundle it with their control panel software.	Support is easy to access, quite nifty.
Disadvantages	* May have to trawl the web to find support. Prone to Joomla’s shortcomings.	Product review module still in development.	Does not support downloadable good, support can be difficult to access.	Can be made to be more user friendly. Said to be resource intensive.
Use it for:	A basic online shop.	Small shop, supports unlimited products.	Robust and reliable, has been around for some time.	Small online store.

There are many other shopping cart software apart from the above, perhaps in due course reviews of other shopping cart will be posted. One particular shopping cart to be mentioned at this juncture is Boss Cart, it is one of the fastest growing ecommerce shopping cart software , it support unlinited products for merchants that sell products. For online traders who sell items such as MP3, PDF files and other digital gooes, there is a module that caters for this too.

Boss Cart Premium – Special Offer

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Boss Cart, the ecommerce software company recently announce a partnership with Velnet designs recently. The partnership makes Boss Cart Premium shopping cart available
to Velnet customers at a discount of up to 50%. Boss Cart Premium is a PHP based ecommerce shopping cart system, it offers a complete out-of-the box online selling solution.

that supports product catalogue of over 10,000 products, with each product displaying up to 7 pictures. Each product has its own unique url, which make Boss Cart Premium eshop search engine friendly. Other search engine friendly features includes ability to export your entire product catalogue to Google’s dedicated  shopping engine; Froogle (also know as Google base).  Define custom title and meta tag for each product, categories and sub categories.
[Read more]

SEO Tips for eCommerce and Online Stores

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.