I recently came across this gem of an article written by the guys over at Get Elastic about how much of an impact a button can have on a potential customer of an e-commerce website. Obviously with e-commerce, building trust is extremely important and therefore consistency and simplicity are your friend. This article gives you some tips and pointers on what kind of buttons to use for your website in terms of colours, design and text formatting. If you are planning to start your own web business I would highly recommend you think long and hard about what colours you are going to use and make sure that they are consistent with your company image or branding. Check out the full article here: 107 Add to Cart Buttons of the Top Online Retailers

Now that you understand the importance of a hosting company for your e-commerce store (covered in Part 1) , we can move on to the actual software to be used. A decade ago there were very few e-commerce software packages that wouldn’t cost you an arm and a leg. Today, however, there are literally hundreds of different options, including a number of absolutely free ones. 

I have decided to describe a few of the most popular packages in use today. These software options are used by millions of stores around the world. When considering a shopping cart (as they are commonly called) you need to consider the language (code) that they are written in as well as the database which it supports. This is very important because it will influence which hosting provider you select to host your website.

osCommerce

This is an open source software package, it is totally free to use and modify. It comes with a number of useful features that are quite easy to use and configure. The site can have an almost unlimited number of products which can be organized into categories. You can also set various discount and promotions. The site allows you to accept most popular payments methods (PayPal, credit cards, cheques,etc). 

Zen Cart

This is an e-commerce solution that has been developed by a number shop owners, programmers, designers and fanatics who have a lot of experience with e-commerce stores. It is a free open source solution with a user-friendly design.

CS-Cart

This is a high quality paid software solution that costs $195 but comes with a 1 month technical assistance package. It is written in PHP and MySql. Installation is very easy with an automated setup. The admin area is very user friendly and easy to understand. The cart has been integrated with more than 35 popular payment gateways such as PayPal, 2CheckOut, GoogleCheckOut, WorldPay, etc. It includes 5 professional templates.It has also an advanced Order management tool, Affilate add-on, Product configurator, Feature comparison and Gift Registry modules.

CubeCart

This is an eCommerce package written in PHP & MySQL. You can setup a powerful online store as long as you have hosting supporting PHP and one MySQL database. CubeCart is very powerful and easy to connect to various payment gateways.

Virtuemart (formerly known as php-Shop)

This is an independent open-source shopping cart solution. However, it is better known as an e-commerce component for Mambo or Joomla! CMS.

Those are just a few of the options available to you. If you haven’t read the first part in this series please see Part 1.

Useful link:

Opening a Web Shop with E-Commerce Software.

This is the first post in a series of posts dealing with the setup of an e-business.

For those who don’t know, hosting is an absolutely vital part of your e-commerce success. It is extremely difficult to get your business online if you don’t have an adequate hosting company. Many large online businesses host their own websites, but for a small startup, this is out of the question. Your host will handle all the necessary technical issues that relate to keeping your site on the internet.

Choosing a hosting company can be daunting task, especially if you have no understanding or no interest in understanding the ins and outs of this technology. So, where do you begin? Firstly let me say that you have a couple of options, you can host locally or internationally, you can also host on a Linux server or you can host on a windows server.

Hosting locally has many benefits, some of which I’m sure you guessed. Let me list a few of these advantages: Local support, faster loading websites for local users and no downtime related to the international link being down. The major disadvantage for local hosting, however, is simply the cost of bandwidth. Once your site begins growing and gets more and more traffic, it’s going to be using more and more bandwidth and you are going to be charged heavily for that bandwidth.

Hosting internationally can work out a lot cheaper, but there are also some difficulties. As mentioned above, when the international connection goes down you site will be unavailable to local users. Your site will load quite a lot slower than a locally hosted site. Overall it’s a good idea to do a lot of research into exactly what your needs will be.

In terms of choosing whether or not to host on a Linux server or a Windows server you need to consider your e-commerce software needs which will be discussed in a future post of this series. In short, most e-commerce software has certain requirements and most often can only be hosted on a Linux server.

Useful links:

WordPress on Speed: 17 Tweaks to Accelerate your WP

Top 50 Guides for Beginning Web Developers

I was reading this post and I totally agree that there is absolutely nothing to stop anyone from starting their own little business, even if it is part-time. I strongly believe that with enough perseverance and hard work, any business venture can be successful.

If you have a dream to be financially independent and really want it bad enough… then to my mind there is nothing standing in your way to making that dream a reality. One of the main purposes of my blog is to help you to reach that dream. I’m passionate about helping others to become successful and I believe that business is not always about competition. We can collaborate to create new vale for ourselves as well as others.

The internet is the perfect medium to achieve your financial goals because of the pure scope that can be achieved! You can create a global business that has the potential to reach millions of people and you can do that in minutes. Now, that doesn’t mean that your success is going to be immediate! It is going to take time and some seriously hard work… That to me is the biggest misconception that people have about the internet. Let me just say this right now…get rich quick doesn’t exist!

With that said, if you focus on filling a need and providing value in everything you do, whether it is value for yourself (enjoying what you do) or value for the client (providing a great product or service), you will succeed! Why? Because people are smart….they can tell when you are sincere and not out to just make a quick buck.

I hope that these few words of advice are helpful and that maybe you become motivated to get up and go start something…Change the world!

(Image by Vladimir)

The first thing that I need to say is that making money is not everything. Not all of us start blogs or websites with the goal of making money as our priority. With that having been said, if you are planning to make money with your website or blog, do you know exactly how you are going to do it? In other words, do you have a plan in terms of what revenue models you are going to use? It’s also good to have an overall plan as i have mentioned before in an earlier post.

The purpose of this post is to try to help you decide how to best monetize your blog or any other website. There are a number of different revenue models available and it’s not all about advertising. Advertising is a without a doubt a great way to make money with your site but it’s not always the most efficient way.

Advertsing-Supported Revenue Model

This model is your basic advertising model in which your website will display an number of banner ads, text ads, google adwords etc. You, being the publisher will be able to decide what kind of ads are displayed, from whom, as well as the sizes of the ads. This type of revenue models is all about getting as many page views as possible so as to get as many clickthroughs on your ads as possible.

Advertising-Subscription Mixed Revenue Model

This model takes advertsing a step further in that you are now creating a second revenue stream through charging a subscription fee for a particular service or product that is received by the customer on a regular basis. As an exampe, many sites charge a monthly fee for access to certain private sections of the site. Now when you combine this with advertising on your site, you are using your site much more optimally.

Fee-for-Transaction Revenue Model

This model is great when your website provides a product or processes transactions on the user’s behalf. There is no need for any advertising to be placed on your website and very often it’s better not to have advertising because it sends a certain message to your customer. I’m not saying that you shouldn’t place ads on your site at all, it’s perfectly acceptable to have a few ads on your site. I’m simply saying that sometimes the impression given to the customer regarding the quality of your service or product, which you are charging for, can be influenced by having “unrelated” advertising all over your site.

Fee-for-Service Revenue Model

This is the final model that I am going to mention, but is by no means the final one available, you can successfully combine all these models and you can come up with new ones too. In this model you charge the customer based on the service that you provide, you could be a consultant or you could be a web designer, it doesn’t matter. Having a blog is a great way to promote yourself or your service and very often no advertising is required to successfully make a profit. However, there is nothing wrong with supplementing you revenue with an additional advertising revenue stream.

The last thing I would like to say is that what I have described above is merely a guideline to help you to be able to plan. I wouldn’t dream of suggesting that you should limit yourself to the above models, all I intended to do was to help you to become aware of the fact that there are many more ways of making money than simply placing banner ads on your website.

I hop that this information was helpful. Please feel free to give your comments or opinions, I love to hear from my readers!