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- Shopping cart system
- Shopping cart features
- Search engine friendly
- Taking payments online
- Stand Alone Cart Mode
- Live Demo site
- Shopping Cart Blog
- 1 Click Template Changer
- Free site designs
- Package Overview
- Bespoke/Custom Design
- Our Portfolio
- Logo design
- Price List
- Testimonials
- How to order
- Visitor statistics tool
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Shopping Cart Software
Any individual or business that has a website which they utilize to sell goods or services will need to have shopping cart software. This software can be purchased or alternatively, may be obtained from a few sources for free. This article compares and contrasts the two different forms of shopping cart software, paid versus free, to determine which variety is superior.
Paid shopping carts have a variety of excellent features. They are fast, so quick that for the majority of web stores a dedicated server is not even required. They generally comply with W3C storefront requirements using CSS basis layouts. Many of them include a variety of professionally designed shopping cart templates. User experience is typically facilitated using WYSIWYG editors and AJAX based parts. Paid shopping carts also work well with the major search engines. Customers are able to set up specific URL's and titles for category and product pages, as well as to add meta tags. This boosts the placement of a business' web site with heavily utilized search engines. Little specific knowledge or programming abilities are required to use them, since they employ intelligent template design engines and simple PHP coding. Perhaps most importantly for the paid shopping cart providers though, they provide quality experts for capable customer and technical services on the software, as well as with both installation and configuration of the various user tasks. They also pride themselves on specifically tailored programming services, as well as professional creation of designs. The purchaser is able to obtain a completely one of a kind design for the storefront and specific functionality appropriate for his or her needs.
Free shopping cart software does provide many, though not all, of these benefits for the business or individual user. With free shopping cart software, the individual receives a secure online store which is optimized for the search engine majors, a simple to utilize software interface which does not need the user to possess technical, involved knowledge, a stand alone, real time order management and inventory system, and email, phone, and real time chat support twenty four hours a day. The user receives a full e-commerce software along with his or her online shopping cart. As it is free, it is not downloaded and installed, but utilized online as a free service. It is the most current Web 2.0 e-commerce protocol, and does come with any and all tools that the business or person will need to enable the web store to get going immediately.
The truth is that although the free shopping cart offers are very tempting at first, they have several significant limitations. Since the software is not downloaded and run off of the business or individual's own server, but is instead run off of a free shopping cart and e-commerce company's server, if anything goes wrong, or the service goes down with the free shopping cart provider, then the user's features and functionality will all be offline as well. It is always a safe assumption to make that services run for free do not turn out to be as reliable as those for which the user pays. Similarly, customer support with for pay companies has to be good, or the company runs the risk of losing the client and his monthly subscription fee. A for free service provider will include customer service, and perhaps twenty four hours a day at that, but they will likely be understaffed, resulting in longer waiting times for the user when he or she is in real trouble with their shopping cart platform.
SEO and Domain Selection
To run a truly successful online business, one must delve into the magic of SEO (Search Engine Optimization). What exactly is SEO? SEO is used by marketing professionals and small business owners alike to secure new clients that are searching for products and services through search engines like Google, or Yahoo.
To optimize your website or online shopping cart, you must choose proper keywords to attract your clients, and drag your website to the top of Google’s listing. It pays to do a bit of research into which keywords sell, and which don’t. It isn’t uncommon for business owners to purchase multiple domains for their website through GoDaddy.com, or another domain provider. They are cheap and easy to connect to your website or blog, and help bring in customers.
Now, let’s talk about using SEO to get more clients. There is a technique called “niche targeting” which I will explain here. Go to Google.com, and type in “Car insurance”. You will see a dropdown list that will have words on it, like: “Car insurance cheap”, “Car insurance for students” (etc). Keep scrolling down the list, and see how many searches have been made. It is safe to say that the terms with the most searches will provide the most competition. As of the time of this article’s conception, there have been over 15 million searches for cheap car insurance, but only fewer than 900,000 searches for “Car insurance for women”. Car insurance for women can be considered a niche market. You would then purchase a domain that matched this search term. “Cheap-insurance-women.com”, or “Car-insurance-women.com”, or “Womenscarinsurance.com”; the point isn’t to make the website’s name attractive, but to draw in your customers. Often, these websites with long and unusual URLS will reference or link to your main website or shopping cart. You would set up a “puppet” website with one of these domains, and contract out a few articles that described the best places to find car insurance for women. In this article, you would center the focus around your true car insurance business, and offer hyperlinks and URLS to your “mothership” website.
This is a commonly-used technique to draw in new clients, but in order for your business and puppet websites to prosper, you must have an attractive design in order to entice them. Many web users have become intelligent enough to tell a puppet website from an actual website, and some (including myself) won’t even bother going to the links advertised on the page. The main cause of this decision for me is whether or not the website looks professional enough to entice me. If it looks poorly designed, I’ll go on my way.
Remember the tips you’ve learned here, and be sure to check back for more internet business tips!
Why Long Tail Keywords Are Better
On the surface, it would seem that long tail keywords aren’t the best choice for an Internet marketing campaign. They don’t generate as many hits as one or two-word phrases, and many of them are quite awkward. However, most experienced Internet marketers prefer long tail keywords over any other. By using them, webmasters have found that they gained not only hits but also a higher ROI on their affiliate marketing campaigns.
If you’re new to Internet marketing, you might be wondering how this could be true. Well, first consider the element of competition. One or two-word phrases tend to be dominated by established companies that have the strongest Web presence. You won’t be able to compete no matter how much SEO you use.
For example, consider the phrase “television.” Even if you put the term in quotes, you will find that over 244 million sites are using it. In comparison, only 92,800 sites are using the phrase “Samsung 52 inch LCD television” when it is placed in quotes. You have a chance at ranking if your website content contains the latter keyword.
Another reason long tail keywords work is because they target a niche audience ready to take action. Going back to the previous example, you can pretty much guess that the term “television” isn’t going to attract too many buyers. It’s just too general. This is not the case with the second term, which references a specific type of television. The people searching this phrase already know what they want. They just need a review or something else to prove to them that a Samsung 52-inch LCD television is what they should buy.
Finally, if you’re using Adwords to drive your Internet marketing campaigns, you will find that long tail keywords are significantly cheaper. Again, consider “television” and “Samsung 52-inch LCD television.” The first term costs £1.55 per click while the second only costs £.05 per click. The long tail keyword remains the best choice for your campaign.
In conclusion, if you are doing Internet marketing, stick to long tail keywords. They might be a little harder to work with when it comes to content writing, but they offer greater rewards. This is especially the case if you don’t have the money or PR to get ranked with one or two-word phrases.
More About Absolute Shopping Cart Software
Many people often thing about starting their own online store and selling their wares on their own website. It sounds like a dream to be able to quit the day job and get rich from selling exclusive products to a worldwide audience. Unfortunately, most of these people have no real idea how to technically make it happen.
Absolute Shopping Cart Software
Setting up an online store sounds like something that is extremely difficult to accomplish and manage and takes technical know-how that must come from years of study in specialized classes at a reputable school of higher education. The good news is that this is not the case. The software to turn any website into an online store that will be ready to immediately start bringing in money is available to the average consumer, and it is called Absolute Shopping Cart software.
Absolute Shopping Cart is touted as the United Kingdom's most popular Shopping Cart system that is fully hosted. Absolute boasts customers in nine different countries around the globe. Hailed as the easiest and fastest online software to use for this application, Absolute Shopping Cart is a great program for people who want to sell products or offer services to the large number of potential customers on the internet.
Absolute Shopping Cart software is a one-stop, all-inclusive program that is the only thing necessary to convert a website into a virtual storefront and bring it into the the exciting world of twenty-first century commerce. Many ecommerce software programs require months of learning how to use them successfully. Configuring the system with the webpage can take even more additional time. However, Absolute Shopping Cart is different from these other software programs. With Absolute Shopping Cart software, users need only to enter their contact information and log in before they can start inputting their products for sale on the worldwide web. This software even offers free web design to users. The program does all the work of completely configuring the site, while the user can focus on more important things like how much money he is going to make by selling his wares using the new technology. And with a variety of website design templates available, users can change designs with ease. Absolute also offers tailor-made website designs for those people who want to be a little more unique than everyone else. If you really want to do it yourself, you can still design your own website and use the Absolute Shopping Cart software. Most people just use the templates because of the ease of use and very attractive lack of annoying headaches that come from not having to tinker with everything to get it just right. As anyone who has ever had a website will attest, messing with the site design can be an incredibly frustrating experience, even for people who have a decent amount of technology experience. Another great option is simply adding the shopping cart to an existing site.
Whatever users choose, they can feel secure in the knowledge that turning their website into an online storefront is as simple as purchasing and installing Absolute Shopping Cart software.
Absolute Shopping Cart Releases 'Next Generation' Search Friendly URLs
Ensuring that a website is search engine friendly is the single most important factor when it comes to site design and our Shopping Cart Software is designed to be as search engine friendly as possible, but what does that really mean?
In basic terms, 'Search Engine Friendly' means that web site pages can be easily found and read or 'indexed' by the search engine spiders. So to make a website search engine friendly you have to ensure that the search engine can find all the links to every single page of your website. For ecommerce websites that may have many 1000s of pages this is no simple task since a site with lots of content will have to be divided into some sort of ordered category structure that makes sense to the visitor and makes it easy for them to find the information they are looking for.
Taking this into consideration, Absolute Shopping Cart software has a simple but thoughfully designed architecture so that search engines can easily find every single page of your website. They can do this no matter how many products or pages you create. Best of all, as a user of our system it will require no work at all on your part as the system creates all of the navigational structure itself.
When you add a new product or new content to your site, the system automatically builds the relevent linking structure including the address of the new resouce page to the site navigation. As well as doing this, it automatically adds the address of the page to a dynamically created site map. The site map is built to Google specifications and can be submitted to Google directly. This means there is no need for you to spend hours creating a site map that has to be manually updated every time you make a change to the site.
Latest Developments
Our latest software creates 'next generation' Search Engine Friendly URLs. Most systems these days only provide a basic type of search engine friendly url which will contain a keyword. However, if you look more closely at some of these so called 'search engine freindly' addresses, they are not quite as clean and tidy as they could be. Take a look at this example below from a typical online store system.
http://www.examplesite.com/cannon-cameras--lens-cases-12-c.asp
The url above contains the keyphrase 'canon cameras' it also contains another keyword 'lens cases'. As well as the keywords, it contains a numerical value which has some significance to the database system running the site but none to the keyword being targeted. You can also see that the URL contains a reference to the technology being used by the website, but this is not relevant to the search query and so it reduces the authority of the address quite significantly. Also, apart from the keywords, for the user it becomes a rather garbled mix of irrelevant double dashes, numbers and letters.
The Structure Of Next Generation Search Friendly URLs
The 'next generation' search friendly urls created by Absolute Shopping Cart software ( see example below) are designed to display in a much more relevant format which creates higher authority links for your site.
http://www.examplesite.com/Product-12/Cannon-cameras/Lens-cases/Cannon-50mm-Lens-Case
For a start, there is no reference to the technology being used to create the page because the file extension at the end of the address (eg .aspx, .asp, .cmf, .html etc ) has been completely removed from the URL. Removing the file extension from the url makes the address more specific and relevant for the kewords being targeted.
In addition, unlike the old style url in the previous example, the URLs created by Absolute shopping cart sofware has a clearly defined, folder type structure which is designed to build relevance into the address in a way that is attractive to Google and the other search engines. The reference to 'Product' in the address tells the search engine what type of page this is a product detail page
Our testing has shown us that Google recognises that this page is likley to provide the user with in depth information relating to a specific item. In fact, we have developed this URL architecture to emulate the structure of Google's own base feed format. The theory being that if Google is asking for product feeds to be submitted in a certain format, then it's highly likely that urls created in a similair fashion will be more readily accepted by the search engine and given a better ranking other competing pages
Product Options in Shopping Cart Systems: What Service Providers will Render
Opening an online business aims at selling your products and services to consumers. With a system operating through the so-called online shopping cart software, there are a lot of things in store for your enterprise. Your service provider for the system should be more than willing to provide you help with how you will be able to market your products to your clients successfully. Product options should then be incorporated within your company's shopping cart.
Product options in a shopping cart will work wonders for your business. The features will give you much ease in making your transactions work. If you really want to profit from your new found business over the net, you must have the effort to take a look at what service providers are willing to render when loading your shopping cart software with product features.
Product features in your shopping cart systems
Consider how consumers shop in department stores and groceries and you will understand the features to be essentially loaded in your shopping cart software. To give you an idea of what your service provider should include, take a look at the following:
• Unlimited options. Products in an online store may be as plenty as the products offered in department stores. Your online shopping cart system should be injected with the opportunity to load unlimited products in your online catalogue. Alongside this fact, you must also have unlimited product categories to render to your clients. Price and size options for products should also be created in such a way that your online screen presents the price depending on the size or bulk of quantities ordered by your clients.
• Image options. Creating thumbnails for each of the products you offer will give your clients an idea of what you are selling. Whilst some patrons think that thumbnails are enough to envision your company's products, the service provider should extend other imaging options. Pictures of products in your websites should be flexible enough in the sense that the images may be resized to give your clients a clearer view of the product offerings of the company. Optimisation of the images will render better visuals to your clients. Add to that the description or details of each product.
• Updating options. Updating, in this particular instance, means that you should have the capacity to amend the prices and pictures of your products. The shopping cart must be able to warn your clients if the items you are offering are currently out of stock.
• Search options. For the convenience of your customers, there must be a search engine box ready for utilisation. What your customers need to do is to type in the keywords for the product search.
What your chosen service providers include in your shopping cart systems will work both for you and your client's benefit. It offers much ease to facilitating and tracking your daily transactions. You must also ask your service provider about giving your clients the chance to create their own wish lists in your site. In this manner, the shopping cart will truly serve its functions.