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

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.
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