Ecommerce & Shopping Cart Software
In 1989, I received my first computer. It was a ZX Spectrum + 3 with 128kb of memory. In fact it was getting this first computer that originally sparked my interest in computers and getting them to do, new and interesting things.
That first year with my new computer showed me just how limited computers really are. I borrowed a book from the library and at 14 years old, I started my programming career.
The first program I ever wrote was a “hello world” program, and then I wrote a word processing application so I could do my school work on the computer. I wrote a printer spooling program to print the work off and so, however eventually I ran out of things to invent and program.
I started looking at the world and the way it worked and had an interesting conversation with my mother, who at the time was waiting for the postman to deliver our gas bill. She wanted to know how much to pay for the bill at the Post Office and then do some shopping, while she was out. She waited all day for the post that didn’t arrive until late afternoon.
This was when I said to her; “One day you will be able to use computers to read your bill at home through your computer and order you’re shopping through your computer and get it delivered on the next day”.
She dismissed the idea as a schoolboy dream. After all, it sounds like science fiction.
To be fair I was just 14 years old and the internet had not even been invented yet, but the idea was there, there was a demand for a service.
It is this service and the rising demand for better services that brings us here today. It is the world of electronic commerce, better known simply as ecommerce.
Ecommerce, is the definition of any transaction that take place by electronic means, such as over the internet, automated phone processing systems and now self service tills at your local supermarket. Usually when people speak about ecommerce they are referring to transactions between a buyer and a seller through the internet.
How is ecommerce even possible you could be forgiven for asking? Well ecommerce is possible because your computer at home connects either by a broadband connection or a dialup connection to a services provide by the people who supply your internet connection, such as Sky Broadband, Virgin media, AOL or however.
These connections are all pretty much the same, you connect to a service, and this service is a bigger computer around the size of family car. These services are in turn connected to one another, so a service in Preston would be connected to multiple other services, let’s say Manchester & Liverpool. The services in Manchester and Liverpool would connect to say London & Paris and so on.
The internet is now millions of these services and connections all over the world, even if part of the service has failed, a secondary service elsewhere still means the connection is pretty much stable. This is known as the World Wide Web or the web for short.
Ecommerce works by connecting a service of our own to this web, the service has to be powerful enough to ensure it can take the thousands of connections needed each day. This service is called web hosting, however you don’t surf the internet by looking for active services that would be impossible, instead you type in a domain such as you have done today for (Usercart.co.uk) the domain name has the service location attached to it. You can find the service simply by typing in the web address or domain name and your computer is connected to it.
Installed on this service or website as we shall now call it, is software. This software has lots of names such as ecommerce software, shopping cart software, shopping cart, web shops and of course online shop software etc, however they are all basically the same thing.
Our shopping cart software is called Shopping Cart Gold. Shopping Cart Gold and Usercart joined forces to provide a better service and products to our customers.
This means our new and improved shopping cart is pretty much the best there is and the extra services we offer means that it is now the most practical way of starting an online shop.
The days of hiring freelancers to complete a myriad of different task has passed, now all of the aspects of running an online shop are brought together in one place and you have a qualified ecommerce consultant on hand to not just guide you through, but actively participate in your success.
Once the website is completed with the domain name, our engineers install our own shopping cart software, called shopping cart gold on to the website. This is what your visitors to the site see.
They can view products, search through catagories, and most importantly purchase online. It is this purchasing online through shopping cart software which is the ecommerce event.
In the early part of the century when we first start our company, the quality of a shopping carts was more functional than anything else. We looked at lots of different shopping carts and compared them so see what features they had, were those features needed to complete a sale, did some of the features help or hinder the customer in the buying process.
Usercart Ecommerce wanted answers to these questions and so we set about purchasing a copy of all the different shopping carts and online shop software available at the time. Some of them were terrible, they were difficult to install and we are experience professionals beyond graduate level in ecommerce.
Others were overpacked with features almost to the point that it really was difficult to go through a checkout procedure and complete a sale.
Eventually we weeded down the list of what we considered to be the best shopping carts down to around 4 different products. These were OScommerce, Zencart, Cubecart and ClickCartPro. We looked at how each of these shopping cart programs worked and wanted to improve on them for our very own php shopping cart engine, which was going to be name simply “2trade”.
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ClickCartPro seems promising as it was fairly easy to install and looked professional, it was considered by us that if a customer with a slower connection that they would have to wait up to 20 seconds for each product page to load, once a sizeable amount of visitors were on the site. This was such a disappointment for us, but you cannot expect a customer to sit on a website all day to make a purchase and so this was not an option as it was clearly a non-commercial product in our opinion at the time.
The next piece of shopping cart software we looked at was Cubecart. This seems to tick all of the boxes as far as we could see, but on the product pages there seemed to be a lot going on. There were links all over the place, crossing selling modules trying to tempt you to buy something else, because some one unconnected to you had bought it in the past and it actually took some effort, just to locate the checkout button and checkout to complete a sale. In our opinion it was an even bigger disappointment than ClickCartPro because it was so close to what we were after to offer to our clients.
Usercart Ecommerce has always prided itself in being able to offer its customers an easy way to sell online. Our primary objective in business is the maximisation of sales for our clients. If our clients are making money, then through our subscription fees we make money. Everyone profits.
So with ClickCartPro and Cubecart essentially binned, it was time to look at OScommerce and Zencart. Both of these shopping carts worked in remarkably similar ways, in fact they worked so closely we suspected they were the same piece of online shop software; which had been modified into these two versions use if we could get hold of this primary source code, this is the programming scripts behind each page of the shop, then we could work with that code to create our own flavour and make improvements to the existing format.
In fact there was a common ancestry for both OScommerce and Zencart and the name of it is called “The Exchange Project”. The Exchange Project was very basic and needed a lot of work just to make it into something customers could use.
It did have one major advantage, in that it was open source and we were permitted to take the code and develop the code of the shop and make it our own.
As you can imagine we had a major head start in our development and the first thing we did was see how easy it was to install the shopping cart software on to a website.
The first time we tried it, we managed to it do it in around 5 minutes, we managed to get the installation time down to a office record of 43 seconds.
We next looked at all of the features of the shop, which although were basic, there was room to redevelop them and put own work on them. So like a modified car, we set about taking things out and adding things into it, improving the database interactions to make the web pages load faster, we improved the images for each product listings by adding more image options, and thumbnails, images that were search engine optimised for better results in search engines such as Google.
We improved the shopping cart for processing credit cards, making it much more secure any easier for everyone to use. We even added a one page checkout for the clients who wanted to add this facility to their customers. We added search engine optimisation for each product and so on and so forth.
By the time we were ready to offer our product to paying customers; we had completed and implemented over 14,000 major and minor changes, most notably the shop front and admin control panel, which renamed the “dashboard”, which were completely redeveloped from our own code.
2trade as our shopping cart software was known then was a trendsetter, in that we managed to lift the standard of shopping carts from a novelty piece of software that needed a lot of work and redevelopment to a piece of software anyone could use to launch their own ecommerce online shop, which needed very little in order to trade. Hence the name “2trade” was the first incarnation of our shopping cart software.
Our developments didn’t stop there, year on year as our company began to grow. At first it grew slowly and in more recent years much more rapidly we saw our competitors catch up to us and so we needed to redevelop our online shop software.
We improved yet again the search engine optimisation of each product so it made it easier to be found a ranked by search engines such as Google. We improved the product description page, making it completely editable, so you didn’t need any programming knowledge to add products descriptions, in fact you could now add videos, youtube videos, flash and much more.
We always had one objective which we have repeatedly come back to again and again. We add nothing that does not improve the sales to our customer’s websites. Anything that gets in the way of the customers ability to purchase from our clients websites doesn’t get in.
An example of this was the verified checkout procedure we invented. This took around a month to develop and it meant when a customer signed up as a new user, it would send them a email with a link on it to click to verify that they are who they say they are and not just typing in random information to see what the checkout procedure was like to use.
It became clear to us, that in order to verify the link, the customer would have to either open up an email reader, such as outlook or outlook express or alternatively they would have to log into a service like hotmail or yahoo. Our checkout would not allow them to proceed without being verified.
What we found was happening was customers would leave the site and either verify themselves or not verify who they were and sometimes not come back. Once they had disengaged from the buying process we had lost them and so this was one of the ideas that although worked technically it was scrapped as a solution.
In 2008, we launched Usercart Lithium with 6 major updates over the next 2 years to take advantage of features Google offered called Google base. We will talk more about Google base later in this Webinar. Usercart was a massive success to us and to our clients, who had now swelled to nearly 10,000 customers since our business started.
In 2010, Shopping Cart Gold was setup in our development centre in Chiang Mai, Thailand. Its goal was towards one end, which was improving the existing Usercart and makes it even easier for our clients to start, run and maintain their online shops.
When the development was completed in 2011, we were amazed at how easy it was to use and how little resources it used up compared to earlier version of our own shopping cart solution.
Shopping cart software has evolved a great deal in the past 10 years and now Usercart Ecommerce has formally merged with Shopping Cart Gold, to offer both aspects of ecommerce. Usercart Ecommerce provides the complete solution to new users, while Shopping Cart Gold focuses on existing customers who simply wish to change their shopping cart software rather than start from scratch again.
As a combined force under the Usercart Ecommerce banner, ecommerce is now more focused on sales for our clients, than fancy features such as social networking on the product page.
We touched upon Google base briefly. Google base now renamed Google Merchant Centre is where you can submit a feed to Google. A feed is a small text file with a reference to each and every product you stock. In the good old days of Google base, this text file would need to handwritten by a third party company who usually charge a fee for each product submitted on the feed.
Our developments now mean that Shopping Cart Gold now creates this feed for you and automatically submits it Google for free. You can submit up to 100,000 products to be listed within a few hours on Google free of charge. When a person types into Google “Apple Ipod 4″ which for example is a product you might well stock, Google provides a link from its search direct to you product page, directly to page you want the customer to visit.
This major advance pioneer by us means you can now submit an entire inventory of your stock to Google in less than a 2 hours for the full 100,000 products or around 0.3 seconds per product. You can set the shop to update this list held on Google as often as you like.
Very little extra marketing needs to be done, as a steady stream of customer’s type in products into Google and end up on your site, ready to purchase. You can concern yourselves with dispatching goods as the automated checkout means you can take payment 24 hours a day everyday.
This brings us nicely to our final subject which is credit card processing and this is an area of particular expertise to Usercart Ecommerce.
Let’s call a spade a spade for a moment. Accepting credit and debit cards when the customer is not present, which is the case for the majority of ecommerce transactions is risky. How do you know that a thug has pushed some old lady into the bushes and stolen her purse and then jumped on the internet to buy some goods from your website using the card?
This problem is being addressed thankfully, by Visa & MasterCard with the introduction of “Verified by Visa & MasterCard Securecode”.
However it is not fool proof, especially if the entire purse has been stolen, as it will no doubt have the customer’s date of birth on the driving licence etc and can be comprised to still release funds.
There are 3 main ways to be able to accept credit and debit cards online.
Using a merchant account issued to you from a bank
Using a third party processor such as Alertpay or Paypal.
Collect the details of the card and user and type the details directly into a PDQ machine in a shop.
A merchant account, sounds like it is a business bank account, which most banks issue, however this should not be confused. A merchant account is a specialist product, which assigns a number to you, so that Visa & MasterCard and take payments from your customers and deposit money directly into this account.
Once the money settles, which can depend on the facility offered to you, then it is transferred to you business current account.
A major problem with getting a merchant account is finding a bank willing to take a risk that you will actually send out the goods once you have been paid. With no trading history this is often a sticking point. Usercart Ecommerce has built up 10 years experience in working with different banks around the world to enable to new traders to get onboard.
Many companies such as us use a third party secure payment provider. In our case we use Alertpay.com as they handle all of the transactional side of our business on the latest security servers, which means we don’t need to worry about the capital costs of protecting and storing of customers card details as we do not handle them.
The third method is not recommended and this is where you have a retail shop offline on the high street and you simply type in the card details into the PDQ machine sometimes know as a chip and pin machine. There is no seller protection and can leave you liable to chargeback’s if the card later turns out to be stolen.
Usercart Ecommerce is able to integrate our software with most of the well known credit card processors and if you present us with one we haven’t come across we’ll commission the integration for you at no extra cost.
Once the credit card processing is integrated into your shopping cart software, you will be able to accept payments 24 hours a day every.
Google base and other marketing programs we use for our clients, will ensure a steady stream of visitors to your site and get you making sales and we take care of the ecommerce web hosting, online shop software and ensure when you need us, we’ll be here.
Source: ArticlesBase.com
