As business continues to make the transition into stronger and more competitive ecommerce, the need for attractive sites becomes more important. However one truly vital aspect of the ecommerce architecture in the construction of an efficient and well organised shopping cart system. When businesses opt to make the transition into or are just in their ascendency in ecommerce, it is vital that they integrate a well developed shopping cart system. Without this, the website will face a multitude of issues and most likely the site will either fail or struggle to rival more effective competitors.

Obviously the most critical issue is failure to issue or take payments. If a shopping cart can’t handle the very basics of its function, then what use is it? Furthermore a failure to register purchases in the company’s database will start a whole host of issues and lose any potential customers instantly. Hence it is standard procedure to test and retest systems before putting them into full implementation.

However, even fully functional shopping cart systems can still need improvement. In any online system there is a tendency towards scepticism from the user. This is not without good reason. The internet and the high rates of fraud associated with it makes it very difficult for users to assure themselves that the site they’re providing their details to is genuine. It is very much in the company’s interest to make the stages of using the system as hassle free and informative as possible. As a result, the best examples of shopping cart systems provide the user with the proper information at relevant times and are both efficient and professional in appearance.

Out of this need for near perfection in shopping cart function, some businesses have taken it upon themselves to provide pre-developed shopping cart systems which can be individually tailored to a variety of sites. Through this businesses can pay to outsource their system knowing that it has been developed professionally and effectively ‘pre-tested’ by other sites which have opted for it.

In this way a multitude of websites subscribe to similar effective methods of Online Credit Card Processing due to subscription to the systems of an effective Payment service provider. This useful approach is in turn is effective for the business using the model, as well as instilling confidence in the site for the customer.

Infusionsoft vs 1ShoppingCart is a common online shopping cart software comparison, but is it really a fair ecommerce comparison to make?

Infusionsoft stakes its claim with their advanced email marketing system… while 1ShoppingCart is best known for being a very basic, mature hosted shopping cart system.

So let’s take a closer look at each of the systems and look for areas of commonality, and then areas of exception and individuality. By the end of this comparison, you’ll see that both Infusionsoft and 1ShoppingCart both excel in certain areas, and as is expected, both struggle in others.

Depending upon where your online ecommerce business needs lie, you should be able to easily choose one system over the other since they each address a unique target market.

Infusionsoft – Getting Specific

Infusionsoft places a high degree of their focus on email marketing. In other words, their software is best suited to online marketers that use the business model of getting their website visitors to “opt-in” to one of their mailing lists by offering some form of “ethical bribe” i.e. Free report, free newsletter, etc. Once this person has opted into the emailing list, then the objective is to use the automated follow up messages and broadcasting tools to then sell them products and/or services.

The advantage to this type of marketing is that you’re able to market to your email list repeatedly and for no additional cost (unless your email volume exceeds 75,000 monthly).

There are 3 areas where Infusionsoft misses the mark:

1. Complexity – Since this system is targeted towards the “geek” set, many people with only average technical skills will struggle to make use of anything more than the most basic functionality. There’s a reason why there are so many Infusionsoft consultants… because they are needed by so many Infusionsoft users.

2. Non-Email Sales Functionality – If you’re not using an email centric sales model, the biggest advantages of Infusionsoft will be lost on you and then you’ll simply be paying a high price for a basic shopping cart.

3. Cost – High start up costs, triple the monthly price of 1ShoppingCart and high priced consultants needed to make it work for your business.

1ShoppingCart – Getting Specific

1ShoppingCart is a very basic hosted online shopping cart system that works well for basic sales, and is fairly simple to set up and operate. They offer a basic shopping cart, affiliate system and autoresponder all in one package, along with some basic integration with 3rd party systems such as AWeber, Wishlist, aMember.

If you’re looking for a basic system, then 1ShoppingCart offers just that.

The weakness of 1ShoppingCart will start to manifest as your business grows, and your needs become greater.

1. Affiliate System – While the system does a good job of recording sales, paying your affiliates with 1ShoppingCart could not be more time consuming, more cumbersome and more manual.

2. Autoresponder – From a technical standpoint, the system has many useful features, but from a deliverability perspective you’ll quickly discover that deliverability becomes a thorny issue and the large “power users” of 1ShoppingCart all migrate over to AWeber.

3. Support – If you want phone support, get ready to pay $34 per support call or $370 per year for an annual subscription. This additional cost needs to be factored into your value decision.

The comparison between Infusionsoft and 1ShoppingCart comes down to your individual business. If your focus is on email marketing, then spend the extra money and go with Infusionsoft. If you only need a basic shopping cart system and do not plan on using affiliates to sell your products, then go with 1ShoppingCart.

Best Wishes,

Wendy

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The user experience is perhaps the most important aspect of your website. It does not matter if you sell the perfect product. If customers can't find what they want, or the website design confuses them, they won't stay long enough to come to love your brilliant products. Work with a user experience developer that understands how the user interface (UI) affects the overall success of the site.

1. The Audience: Before you even think about starting your e-commerce site, you must learn about your audience and potential customer. What do they want? What do they expect to see on your website? If they can't find the information they need immediately, they'll move on.

2. Website Goals: Obviously, the goal of an e-commerce website involves the sale of goods or services. However, you need clarity when working with a UI designer. You have two main options, you can pull in customers by immediately presenting them with products, or you can provide an interactive interface that allows customers to express their interests and receive custom recommendations based on their answers.

3. Functionality: How functional is the website? Do users have to search for the search bar? Is the information they want and need readily available and easy on the eyes? Use colors like blue or orange that are non-straining and promote sales.

4. Testing: Set up various website portals to see what website design pulls in more sales and meets your goals. The design and method of selling the product can mean the difference between a successful sale and a lost customer.

5. Marketing: Customers that stumble upon your site need to quickly understand what the website specializes in. Run tests with people to see how quickly they can identify the website services or products. Ask them what the first element they noticed was and see if that lines up with the goals of your website.

6. Promotions: Offer a promotion for first time buyers that is easy to view and find. If the promotion blends in too well with the website, customers won't notice it. Avoid making it look like a sponsored advertisement or spammy promotional link. Concentrate on developing a UI that instills a sense of trust in your customers.

7. Newsletters: Newsletters are an excellent way to pull in users that found your site and became interested in your product or service, but maybe they weren't in a position to buy anything yet. If a newsletter subscription appears prominently on the site, you can bring those "lost" customers back with promotions and coupons.

8. Product Reviews: People have bought your products, right? Offer incentives for users to leave product reviews by allowing them easy ways to comment on your site. Product reviews and positive testimonials should be easily located on the website. Your UI designer should know how to effectively create attractive product listings and make it possible for quick product reviews.

9. Social Aspects: Incorporate a forum, or allow people to discuss your products on social media sites. Every website should have a section located near the bottom or top of the site that lists social media icons. Customers look for these icons to develop trust with the company and see what others are saying about the service and products.

10. Appearance: Why is appearance last? Because, while it is important, without a properly functioning site with the necessary components for success, the website will fail. A pretty site certainly instills trust in customers, but it does no good if the customer can't find what they want.

PaySpree is a new digital marketplace has just arrived on the scene. The biggest and most popular digital marketplace is by far ClickBank, with the next biggest rival being PayDotCom.

Digital marketplaces are responsible for billions of dollars in online sales every year. They sell anything that’s instantly downloadable like ebooks and software, as well as subscriptions to membership sites.

Because of the low to nil overhead for product owners of digital products, affiliates are paid extremely high commissions to promote their products, sometimes even 100% of the sale!

Let’s compare the 2 main digital marketplaces, ClickBank and PayDotCom, and the newcomer on the scene, PaySpree:

ClickBank Pros

– Affiliates get paid weekly by direct deposit to their bank account

– Hundreds of thousands of affiliate members

– Payments to affiliates and refunds automated

ClickBank Cons

– $300 limit on vendor products

– $49.95 activation fee per product

PayDotCom Pros

– No product activation fee for vendors

– No limit on vendor product prices

PayDotCom Cons

– Affiliate payouts and refunds are not automated

– Long wait for affiliate commissions

– Affiliate membership is not very large

PaySpree Pros

– Instant affiliate commissions to your PayPal account

– No product activation fees or approval process

PaySpree Cons

– New network and therefore not many affiliates

– Refunds not automated

In my opinion, PaySpree will be a major rival to ClickBank in time. Because of the instant payments to affiliates, PaySpree will be more popular with affiliates than PayDotCom. And because of its less restrictions and no activation fee for new products, it will be more popular with vendors than ClickBank.

Online eCommerce systems are easily available on the internet for example Prestashop, Magento, osCommerce, Zen Cart and etc. With so many different systems, we really need to know which system to use and which one will matches our types of business best. This article aims to provide you five important features of the eCommerce systems so that you can decide for yourself which system suits your online business best.

Catalog Management

Catalog management is an important aspect of an eCommerce solution. It manages all your products under one roof, ideally it should come with batch import and export functions, and this is an important feature when you have many products to be uploaded onto the website. This feature can help you reduce valuable time by doing a mass upload/download of products onto your server. Imagine how much time can be wasted if you need to upload 3000 products onto your server manually. The catalog should also allow you to manage the prices of your products easily. It should also come with a scheduler to allow you to schedule the prices of your products automatically. When browsing your catalog, the system should also come with a filter and built-in search facility that can help you locate your products easily.

Marketing and Promotions Tools

Marketing and promotion is very important for you eCommerce website. A successful eCommerce store needs occasional online promotions and marketing campaigns to keep your visitors coming back and make that important purchase. Make sure your eCommerce system allows you to create and manage discount coupons, create and manage pricing rules for members and non-members. Powerful tools to allow you to upsell and cross sell your products. These tools are essential for your site to retain customers.

Shipping and Delivery Features

Depending on the type of products you sell on your online store, a well-designed shipping and delivery module is important for your eCommerce site. The delivery/shipping module is the most important feature for the end customers. The system needs to allow your visitors to select the types of delivery options for his/her order, the system also need to auto calculate for the visitor the shipping charges. On top of these, it is also important for you to know what are the international carriers supported and how easy if it for you to integrate the carriers into your system. For example DHL and FedEx provides real-time shipping rates, you need to know how you are able to integrate to them into your eCommerce system.

Payment Modules

Similar to shipping and delivery, the payment module is the one of the most important feature in an eCommerce system. Getting paid is the ultimate aim of most eCommerce site selling products and subscriptions. Your eCommerce system needs to support the major payment gateways and systems available. E.g. PayPal, Worldpay and 2Checkout. Your eCommerce site visitors should also be given the freedom to choose from a list of different payment options as different payment systems are popular in different regions in the internet.

Search Engine Optimization

The last important feature of my list is the Search Engine Optimization (SEO) feature in the eCommerce system. SEO is very important in all eCommerce sites, your products and services need to be crawled and indexed by search engines. Without SEO, nobody can find the products they want on the internet, and your site cannot find her customers. Unless you are able to market your eCommerce site’s products to the world by other means, otherwise no one will be able to find your products. To be search engine optimized, your eCommerce system needs to generate for you search engine friendly (SEF) urls, they should also help you generate sitemaps automatically to allow you to submit your site to the search engines. They should also provide you the feature to input the meta-information of you products easily on the admin panel of the eCommerce system.

By knowing your online business well, you should be able to decide for yourself which eCommerce system is best for your business. These important features in the eCommerce system will help you manage and operate your eCommerce site efficiently, without these important features, you can find yourself wasting a lot of unnecessary time and effort managing your eCommerce store. If you still cannot decide which system is best for your business needs, you should always consult an expert in developing and customizing eCommerce systems, these guys can provide you the best solution for you and make sure that you time will not be wasted on managing your site but to be used on make more sales on the eCommerce industry.

Selling products on-line requires a very different setup from your run-of-the-mill blogging site. Lets look at the things you’ll need to think about when setting up an eCommerce website and help to explain why they cost more to design.

First let me tell you what we’re not going to cover in this article.

We’re not assuming that an eCommerce website is a single web page with some PayPal button codes inserted onto it.

The PayPal buttons are great and work very well for those selling a handful of items, but we’re taking eCommerce to the next level and giving the customer a better on-line shopping experience.

Most modern eCommerce website are applications. They have a user interface, administration settings, store data in a database and follow a work-flow of processes. We’re going to touch on some of these areas.

The Basics

An eCommerce website can be thought of as a play with actors performing it’s scenes.

The main actors in an eCommerce website are:

* The Customer – buys products

* The Website Owner – ships bought products & gets paid

* The eCommerce Application – interface between all the actors

* The Payment Gateway – handles payment transactions (more on this later)

* The Merchant/Business Bank Account – Website owner’s business bank account (more on this later)

The main buying process of an eCommerce website (‘the play’) happens as follows:

1. Customer browses product catalogue

2. Customer adds product to basket

3. Customer buys product and enters check-out process

4. eCommerce Application contacts a Payment Gateway

5. Payment Gateway provides secure customer shipping and payment details entry form

6. Customer securely enters shipping and payment information

7. Payment Gateway contacts Website Owners’ Merchant Bank Account

8. Merchant Bank Account processes payment transaction and returns control to Payment Gateway

9. Payment Gateway returns Customer to eCommerce Application

10. eCommerce Application notifies Customer of successful (or failed) payment

11. eCommerce Application notifies Website Owner of purchase

12. Website Owner ships product to Customer

Of course there’s a lot more detail going on in each step, but hopefully you get the general idea that setting up an eCommerce application is a tad more complicated than your regular blog-style website.

Where Do You Start?

Sounds silly right, but the first step you need to do is think about the types of things you’ll be selling on-line.

Are these products?, i.e. physical items that require packaging and posting or services provided by yourself or another provider e.g. Professional Yak Grooming.

How may products or types of services are you going to offer? Local or International? Are some seasonal? Do you have a finite stock level for particular items? Do you plan to use special offers & discounts? Do you even like yaks?

This leads to customer and payment questions.

Who are your customers? Where are they? How are they going to pay; credit card, cheque, PayPal? Which bank account will I need to set up?

And then there are the support questions.

How do you handle returned goods? How do you refund payments? How do you handle complaints?

Having a think about the products and services you’re going to offer is vital because the first thing a web designer is going to ask you when you’re requesting a quote is “How many things are you selling and to whom?”

The reason is of course time and costs.

Selling 50 products to a UK only customer base using PayPal requires a very different setup and hence costs, to one selling 1000+ products internationally and taking credit card payments.

Lets look closer at some of the important eCommerce application areas.

The eCommerce Application

Essentially, an eCommerce application is a bespoke Content Management System (CMS). So as well as updating posts and blogs it specialises in updating products and services and supporting commerce functions.

Like any CMS, the application splits the eCommerce website into two major parts; the front-end or shop-front where the customer can browse and buy goods and the back-end where you login to an administration dashboard and manage the website options, including the product catalogue.

The Product Catalogue

This will likely be your most important concern and is central to any eCommerce website design.

The product catalogue is where all your goods-for-sale data lives. The product name, description, cost, stock level, pictures etc. are all stored in here.

We sometimes get people asking which files their products are stored in and they get in bit of a tizzy when they can’t find them on the server.

Usually, product catalogues are stored in a database, but don’t worry – you don’t have to know how to use a database. The eCommerce application does that for you through the product catalogue interface in the Administration Dashboard.

Being able to manage this yourself is vital, otherwise you’ll be going back and forward to the web developer and the costs will rack up.

Thankfully, the eCommerce applications that we use, Magento and WordPress e-Commerce, once installed, allow you to manage your own product catalogue from within the web browser.

The Magento product catalogue has advanced options and allows for things like adding discount codes, customer reviews, product videos etc., whereas the WordPress e-Commerce catalogue offers a simpler solution while still covering the essential requirements you’ll need to sell stuff on-line.

So how do you go about entering and updating all this product information?

The Admin Dashboard

Accessing a special web page on your site and entering a username and password will take you to the options part of your eCommerce website. This is commonly known as the Admin Dashboard.

Here, you will be able to update almost every aspect of the website including accessing the product catalogue, shipping costs, currency exchange rates, payment gateways, sales reports etc.

Whichever eCommerce solution you choose from us, we’ll setup some or all of your product catalogue and make sure that customers can purchase items and that you get paid through a payment gateway (more on that late

The Shop Design

Of course your shop will need a look and feel to fit in with your business brand.

Again, just like other CMS’s a web designer will be needed to develop a theme or template which will transform the default shop-front into whatever design you have in mind for your customers.

Themes can be bought off-the-shelf for both WordPress e-Commere and Magento and you can apply these yourself, however, you may prefer to have a design exactly the way you imagined it and different from any of your competitors.

Themes are applied from the Administration Dashboard. You may be able to change a few aspects of the theme, such as your logo, background colour, text colour, however, you’re not going to be able to move parts of the theme around to different areas of the screen. A web designer will need to do this by updating the theme’s code.

Domain Name and Website Hosting

You will of course need a domain name to trade with and a hosting plan to store the website files and databases.

It’s usually best not to purchase a hosting plan until you’ve spoken to a web designer and they have given you an idea of the best solution to implement.

Many of the cheaper hosting plans that are offered to you when purchasing a domain name, do not support databases or database applications. They may charge an extra setup and yearly fee for setting this up.

So try to avoid buying a hosting plan until you talk to a web designer and have an idea of the type of eCommerce solution you’ll need to implement your ideas.

Merchant Bank Accounts vs Business Bank Accounts

Certainly in the UK, you must have a business bank account to legally trade as a business.

Business bank accounts can be used just fine with an eCommerce application but you will need to setup a Payment Gateway service to handle the payment transactions and get the customers money into your bank account.

If you’re opening up a business bank account and your account manager knows you’re going to be running an eCommerce website you may be offered a merchant bank account which is a specialised version of the business account.

The merchant account gives you a Merchant ID number and access to a Payment Gateway service that the bank uses or owns.

It’s likely you’ll need to pay for the setup of a merchant account and it will incur fees, usually on a per-transaction basis.

If you have already setup a merchant account then you will need to make sure your eCommerce application can support the particular payment gateway your bank has given you access to, otherwise you won’t get your money.

e.g. Lloyds TSB uses the Cardnet merchant payment gateway. Royal Bank of Scotland uses the WorldPay merchant payment gateway.

If you were a Royal Bank of Scotland business customer with a merchant account, you would need to make sure your eCommerce application supported the WorldPay gateway.

You don’t need to use the particular merchant account that your business bank offers to trade on-line, but you do need a payment gateway of some sort to handle payments.

That leads us nicely onto payment gateways.

Payment Gateways

We’ve touched on this in the previous section. Essentially, a merchant bank account will give you a payment gateway to use, but you’re limited to just the one that your business bank is affiliated with.

A payment gateway is a service offered by a company.

It handles the payment part of the eCommerce application when a customer proceeds to the checkout to purchase an item.

The payment gateway collects the customers details and payment information securely and contacts your business bank account to complete the money transaction.

This is great for security too as your customers banking details aren’t kept on your eCommerce website, so that’s one less thing to worry about securing.

There are many different payment gateway services with different features and options. As a supplied service they all charge a fee for their use. The fees can include a setup charge and a % commission of the total price of a transaction.

Some payment gateways allow you to pay a monthly or annual fee if your number of transactions are high. This can work out more cost effective for you if your single transactions are high volume but low individual cost.

You’ve probably heard of some of the more well known gateway service providers and not known what they. You’ve also likely used them without even realising they are there. Some of the popular payment gateways are:

PayPal, Google Checkout, SagePay, WorldPay and ChronoPay.

It’s great that you have a choice and the services are very competitively priced so take some time to check out which is best for your business model. If you need some help, we’d be happy to meet up and walk you through the options.

Some payment gateways offer two types of general services; hosted and inclusive.

Hosted Payment Gateways

These options usually don’t require a set-up or monthly fee, however, transaction costs can be higher than an inclusive service.

The PayPal Website Payments Standard service is a good example of this.

Essentially, it limits your customers to having a PayPal account (they must register with the PayPal site) and when it comes to check-out, the customers are transferred from your eCommerce website to the PayPal website for the information gathering and payment transaction, then upon completion redirected back to your eCommerce website.

The downside of this method is really from a branding point of view. You have very limited control of how the payment gateway service, PayPal in this case, looks and operates before it redirects back to your website.

Some customers can be put off by redirecting to another site as confidence in security can be questioned (although PayPal in this instance has a very good reputation).

You’re also limiting the payment method to just those customers who are willing to use the payment gateway’s choice of payment. In this case, the customer must have a registered PayPal account.

A similar process happens if you use the Google Checkout payment gateway.

So what’s the other option?

Inclusive Payment Gateways

Inclusive payment gateways will allow your customers to go through the whole checkout process without (the appearance of) leaving your branded eCommerce website.

I added in “the appearance of” because in some cases your customers will actually leave your website and use the payment gateway service, however, the way it is implemented and embedded makes it looks as if it’s all part of your website and business brand.

So what’s the catch?

There’s usually a setup fee, a minimum subscription period (say 12 months), a monthly fee and of course a whole heap of conditions that apply.

Some particular conditions to look out for are thresholds on the number of transactions per month, or total monthly funds transferred. Payment gateway services can charge extra or insist you upgrade your service if these thresholds are exceeded in a similar way that mobile phone companies will charge you extra if you use up all your inclusive talk or SMS time.

The best benefit of using an inclusive payment gateway is that the whole customer experience from browsing to payment is hosted on your own website. This gives the customer a greater sense of confidence that their data will be kept safe and makes your whole business look and feel more professional.

A good example of this type of service is the PayPal Web Payments Pro.

Securing The Data

If you’re using a payment gateway then the good news is it’s unlikely you’ll be storing sensitive customer payment details on your eCommerce website.

Those types of data will be kept securely in your payment gateway account.

Of course you will be collecting a whole lot of other important and confidential customer information such as name, email, perhaps address, likes, dislikes, a username and password for your site.

All this information needs to be kept secure and your eCommerce application will help with that. The Administration Dashboard will have lots of sections that control who and what can see parts of the collected data.

But that’s not the only security you’ll have to think about. Do you know what happens when you fill out a form on a website and click on submit?

If you have a look at the top of the web browser in the address bar you’ll see the website’s URL address. Most sites will start with http://

(For those that want to know, URL stands for Uniform Resource Location and HTTP stands for Hyper Text Transfer Protocol)

Any web page starting with http:// is transferring data to and from a web server in Plain Text.

This means, that the web page contents, code, images, text, form data are all sent in a format that’s readable to humans. OK, it may not be that readable, but in essence all the information is there in English characters (or whatever language character set your website uses).

Now for some more techie stuff.

When your web page is sent to or received from a web server, there isn’t a 1-to-1 direct connection between your website and the server. The web page data is transferred through hundreds of networks across different countries and through thousands of routing computers and other network devices before arriving at your computer.

This means that at any point during it’s travel, your web page data has the potential to be intercepted and read by whomever.

There isn’t much you can do about the interception part but there is something you can do to make it a darn lot harder for somebody to read and use your eCommerce web page data.

SSL Certificates

Now we’re talking.

Let’s skip the techie bit and quickly tell you what these are and what they do.

You buy an SSL certificate from a web hosting company (annual renewal most likely), install it into your eCommerce website and it encrypts your web page data. Hooorah!

You’ll now notice that parts of your website, likely those that require personal form data to be collected and sent, now start with https://

The addition of that little “s” letter, standing for “Secure”, means that the web page data is encrypted when sent and decoded only at the two end-points; your computer and a web server.

Anyone reading the page in between will see garbled non-readable characters.

You may also see additional signs of a secured web page such as a closed padlock icon.

We would strongly advise you buy an SSL (Secure Sockets Layer) certificate and get this installed and configured for use with your hosting account and eCommerce website.

In Summary

Creating an eCommerce website requires a fair amount of planning.

You’ll need a good web design and web development team to implement your business venture.

It will cost you more and take longer to create than a regular blog or brochure-ware website because of all the design and setup.

You’ll make money – and that’s what’s it’s all about after all…

We hope this helps you start your eCommerce website journey. Of course there’s a heap of things we just didn’t have the time to cover.

Learn more about eCommerce at our website.

Accept All Major Credit Cards and Electronic Checks for your Online Business, Retail Store and Mobile Sales Force using a Single Payment Gateway Service

A real-time payment gateway service provides merchants with a secure method for accepting credit card and electronic check payments. A secure online point-of-sale service allows the merchant to capture customer credit card or checking account information then transmits that information over an encrypted SSL connection. Successful transactions will move the customer payment from the customer’s credit card or checking account to the merchant’s business bank account.

The top rated real-time payment gateway services can be used to process retail, mobile and online customer sales. As a merchant you want to select a virtual point-of-sale service that can support your business as it grows. Therefore, you want to select a payment gateway service that can support multiple sales environments (e.g. retail, online and mobile) without requiring you to open multiple gateway accounts.

Since there are a multitude of real-time payment gateways to choose from I have provided a checklist to help you select the right service for your business. Ultimately, you must select a service that meets the unique requirements of your specific business.

Merchant checklist for choosing a payment service (e.g. features must be included at no additional cost):

o Real-time sales reporting

o Virtual Terminal/Batch Uploads for processing manual transactions

o Virtual POS for processing card present transactions

o Recurring Billing capabilities for processing membership and subscription services

o Integration Method for integrating payment processing into your back office software

o Online knowledgebase

o Online Help Desk

o “Live” Technical Support

o Load-balancing for processing multiple merchant accounts using a single payment gateway account. This will become an important feature as your business grows.

o Commercial and Open Source Shopping Cart Payment Modules

o Secure Online Merchant Interface

o Address Verification (AVS)

o Retail POS software support

o CRM Payment Modules (open source and commercial software support)

o PCI Compliant service

Optionally, you should be able to select the following add-on services:

o Electronic Checks processing

o Advanced Fraud Protection Tools

o PCI Compliant Data Storage and Retention for storing customer payment data

o Mobile Payment Software (e.g. iPhone)

Always keep in mind, when you choose a payment service you are selecting a service to process your customer payments which is the lifeline of your business.

Are you an eCommerce store owner and worrying about satisfying your customers? Well, it is no more a rocket science. Customer satisfaction can be the intricate factor when it comes to running online stores successfully. Being a responsible store owner, you must think in a futuristic way and come up with advanced solutions which can benefit you in a long run. Knowing what your customers like or dislike is an imperative part. The only way to explore their needs/preferences is to send them reports online. Unfolding their requirements will help generate more business revenue.

If you want to send customized surveys to your customers directly from SugarCRM then, there is a groundbreaking plugin for the customer survey, which helps you do exactly what you want! Online store owners can have a smooth process for sending surveys online. Creating multiple surveys using different email templates is as easy as pie! Moreover, with the help of this Plugin, different e-mails are used as survey invitations to users, contacts, accounts and leads.

Key attractions of this Plugin are,

• Easy to use and maintain
• Different usages of templates
• User friendly
• Secure data storage
• Un-subscription feature available
• Set dates for sending survey
• Resend questionnaire to customers
• Save surveys in different formats for future use

Elevate the ROI of your eCommerce store by having below mentioned features to your SugarCRM Plugin.

• Make Survey Templates & Create Questions

If you want to have a better understanding of your customers’ choices then, create survey questions and templates, because there is no other great way to send them a survey having questions of your choice!

• Preview Survey Before Sending

After creating survey questionnaire and templates, you can have a pre look to your surveys. And then send surveys to the specific contacts.

• Set Desired Email Templates

Once you preview the survey, get geared up to set e-mail templates. You can set preferred e-mail templates before sending it.

• Send Survey to Contacts Any day, Anytime

After setting the surveys, send them to the respective contacts anytime and on any day. The report is sent instantly to the specific contacts.

• Resend Survey

A survey can be sent or submitted again. Customers can also re-send the surveys to the admin or store owners.

• Get Summary for Survey Sent

Get an overview of survey sent. Survey reports can be exported in CSV and Grid format. It gives a detailed list of customers!

• Evaluate Surveys to Understand Customers

After getting a brief on survey sent, surveys can be evaluated to understand the customers. Thus, it helps improve customer satisfaction.

• Generate Multiple Reports

Once the evaluation is done, multiple reports are generated in various formats. It enhances the base to know customers’ needs.

Conclusion:

SugarCRM Plugin for customer survey comes with versatility and offers many features! It is easily integrated and deployed to all sized eCommerce stores.

Anybody who’s sold on eBay for a while has learned that eBay doesn’t make it easy to calculate how much money you are actually making or losing. With Final Value Fees, Listing Fees, PayPal Payment Fees, Shipping Costs and Returns it can get to be a bit much. Especially since eBay treats all these different fees and transactions in different ways. For example Final Value Fees and Listing Fees are added to your monthly eBay invoice. However, PayPal Payment Fees are take directly out of the payment itself. Returns are treated like a separate PayPal transaction altogether. Most people rely on Spreadsheets like Microsoft Excel or accounting software like Quicken or Quick Books to handle their accounting. The problem with this approach is that they don’t allow you to easily import data from PayPal. Instead you must download files and then edit the results using a CSV file. Which is all very time consuming.

Then there is the simple idea of doing everything on an Excel Spreadsheet. Which I also tried, creating columns for all the different eBay fees, PayPal Fees and Shipping Cost. When you have hundreds of transactions a month though it can become mind numbing to go back through all your PayPal and eBay records and manually transcribe the data. Plus, a simple error can ruin everything. That’s when I came across an interesting solution: an accounting application being offered through an eBay third party developer. The application promised to do some pretty amazing things, namely to import all PayPal Payments and eBay and PayPal Fees. Fees would automatically go under expenses and Payments under income allowing you to only enter shipping cost and cost of inventory. It also said that it could create tax information for quarterly or yearly tax payments. I was skeptical but at the time the application was free so I gave it a shot. I must say I was amazed at how much they delivered on what they promised. It become very simple to keep track of expenses and to see how well I was really doing as a seller.

Even though they have recently moved to subscription based service I still believe it is one of the best accounting solutions for eBay sellers. For small monthly fee it frees up much of the time spent on mundane accounting tasks to allow you to focus on what you need to: growing your eBay business.