Increase Revenue of your Ecommerce Store with Magento Development

If you are in retailing or want to get into the business of buying and selling products, the online business gives you several opportunities. With the help of an ecommerce store, you can not only market your business but also increase its revenue manifold. To start an ecommerce store, taking the help of a content management system is essential. Magento is considered to be one of the best ecommerce platform when it comes to ecommerce development. Magento development helps you get a robust website that is highly scalable, flexible, user-friendly, robust and above all can increase the revenue of your business. Being an open source platform, finding a Magento developer who will help you start an ecommerce store from scratch isn’t difficult.

How to Increase Revenue of Your Ecommerce Store with Magento Development

1. Creates Attractive and Informative Home Page: The home page is literally the face of your business. A good looking home page can draw more users to your site and a bad looking one can simply force them to click the cancel button. Magento development allows you to be creative while at the same time lets you remain grounded and add all the functional elements to the page, like search engine, list of various products, offers and discounts etc.

2. High on SEO: To survive in the fierce competitive Internet business, optimizing a website to make it search engine friendly is very important. The back end of Magento is coded in such a manner that it easily attracts the search engine spiders. No matter how heavy your website is, Magento ensures that it is coded lightly and thus helps increase traffic.

3. Multiple Payment Gateways: For the success of any ecommerce store, Magento developers include multiple payment gateways that make the store user-friendly for the customers. When you offer more payment options, the customer will not have to be disheartened that he couldn’t make the purchase because his convenient mode of payment wasn’t one of the options available in the store.

4. Currency Converter: To help you reach global customers, Magento has an option of currency conversion. With the help of a currency convertor, a customer can shop from any corner of the globe and pay in any currency.

5. Easy Carting: Shopping on a Magento developed ecommerce store is convenient as it has an easy-to-use carting solution. A customer can add products into the shopping cart, store it and purchase the same at a later time.

6. Multi Lingual Support: Another advantage of Magento is that it is not only made for the English language. Magento supports several languages, thus increasing the usability of an ecommerce site. With the help of Magento you can easily target non-English speaking customers too.

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Which Ecommerce service you should choose for your store?

Getting an online store in the present time is imperative. The wide spread popularity of ecommerce portals and stores have now provided the business owners an easy and superlatively cost effective way to market and sell their products online. However, the problem creeps in when the online store aspirants have to make the choice between which service to choose. We have break the problem down for you and have reviewed 4 of the top ecommerce website development platforms. Check out the positives and negatives of the same and make the right choice for your online store.

1. OsCommerce

http://www.oscommerce.com

OsCommerce is a preferred choice for a lot of online store owners and the list of noteworthy users includes – LinuxUk and TruffleShuffle.

The impressive features of OsCommerce includes multiple payment options. It supports a variety of payment gateways including – 2Checkout.com, PayNova, PayPal, Authorize.Net, TrustCommerce, SecPay, PSIGate, ChronoPay and iPayment etc.

Features Overview:

• The features of OsCommerce includes:
• Unlimited support to products and categories
• Multiple currency support.
• Back end supported by sturdy object oriented PHP
• Support both the products – the ones which are downloaded / virtual and the ones that are shipped / physical. 

The problem with using OsCommerce is that the front end of OcCommerce is not developed using CSS (cascading style sheet language) and thus it is a huge problem to skin and reskin the pages. However if you are more comfortable with using tables in the website development, OsCommerce is for you.

Another advantage of OcCommerce is that it is immensely popular and thus you get support of the online community backing up OsCommerce.

2. ZenCart
http://www.zencart.com

Getting straight to the point, ZenCart may not support as many payment options as OsCommerce, but when compared to the above ecommerce publishing solution, Zencart turns out to be a more mature and functional solution. Where OsCommerce takes a lot of time to fix certain necessary issues requiring immediate attention, ZenCart fixes the same on an urgent basis. One of these issues is safety of the online store.

ZenCart is basically an extension to OsCommerce, thus the users can expect a kind of similar features and attributes. When it comes to payment gateways, ZenCart supports – Authorize.Net, LinkPoint and PayPal etc.

Features Overview of ZenCart:

• XHTML 1.0 Transitional validation to the user front end
• The coding changes being conducted in PHP are completely protected during upgrades via in built protection system, which is integrated with phpBB.
• Integration with phpBB
• Controlling the Meta Tags and descriptions at the “per product” level. 

3. VirtueMart

http://www.virtuemart.net

vitrueMart is perhaps the best solution available to you in case your web applications are based on Joomla or mambo for that matter. Both Joomla and VirtueMart are built with PHP, and thus VirtueMart works wonders in a PHP / MySQL platform.

Features Overview of VirtueMart

• control the Products and Items at the stock level
• Products overview is powered by AJAX and thus the new products can be easily and immediately added to the cart.
• You can add the Product Attributes such as Size or Color to the Products
• Easily Manage multiple States, Countries and Currencies
• Demonstrate availability of the products
• Multiple Payment Gateways Support.
• Easy Integration with Joomla – if you have a functional Joomla website, Integration is done within or less than 5 minutes.

4. Magento

http://www.magentocommerce.com

Magento is the dedicated piece of work of Varien, a web development firm situated in Los Angeles, and if we may so say, what a marvel they have produced. It is by far the best open source ecommerce web development platform and has certain really exciting features. It is evident that the developers at Varien have thought of each and every anticipated attribute and contained it in the website design. Price and product comparison, wishlists, shop by category and price etc, these are the certain much sought after features and you get the same in Magento.

Features Overview

• Really, it was overwhelming to include all the features of Magento in the list, however we have mentioned a few essentials. For a detailed look, flock the website.
• Google Analytics Integration
• Options for Multiple images per product with a refined Zoom in viewing
• Addition to the wishlists
• Catalog importing and exporting in a batch
• Checkout in a single page
• Multiple language and currencies support

The Ultimate Choice:
Let us begin with a disappointing answer – the best choice is dependent on your own requirements. Disappointing as it may sound, it is true nonetheless. Clearly Magento wins over the rest of the platforms, but for a specific requirement, go with the specific solution. Like if you have a Joomla website, you know the solution is VirtueMart.

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Points to be taken care while doing online shopping

Due to today’s hectic life style, sometimes it is quite difficult to manage multiple things together like job, house management, shopping, taking care of kids, etc. Amongst all essential things, shopping is the only task, we usually ignore just because of lack of time. But thanks to ecommerce website development as it has revolutionized the way of our shopping. In case, you cannot visit to a shopping mall or a physical store, online shopping is just the right mode of purchase goods of your choice. Whether you want to buy a laptop for yourself or a diamond ring for your would be, everything is available over the internet. Because of several advantages, more and more people these days are opting for online shopping instead of going out for usual style shopping. However, online shopping has proven to be the best way of buying the products at the convenience of sitting at home, but there are some essential points that should to be taken care while doing online shopping.

Research the website before placing your order: However, it is always better to do the shopping with well known websites. But if the website is unfamiliar, do proper research before buying their products. If you think the website is reliable, start out with buying an inexpensive product to ensure the trustworthiness of the website.  

Carefully read the site's privacy and security policies: A reputable website always provide information regarding how it processes your order. This information is usually available in the ‘Privacy Policy’ section. You should be informed, if the merchant is sharing your information with a third party or associated company. Do they need these companies to desist from marketing to their customers? If not, a ‘spam’, mail or phone call from these companies can be expected.

Check the website’s reliability: Before placing your order, it is recommended to check the reliability and credibility of that website. Ensure that the online store must have a confirmed track record of having satisfactorily served a good number of customers along with lots of testimonials. Moreover, you can easily speak with someone if required. It would be great, if you can take the advice from the person who has already purchased from that online store.

Be alert from behavioral marketing and cookies: Ecommerce web development provides the facility to the online merchants and websites to watch our shopping and surfing habits by using ‘cookies’. Cookies are nothing but an online tracking system that connects pieces of code to our internet browsers which help to track visited websites. Website owners use these cookies to identify you and accelerate the shopping procedure next time you visit. Furthermore these days, lots of companies are specialized in targeted online advertising known as ‘behavioral marketing’. Companies state it consumers advantage by being exposed to more targeted advertising and that website owners can efficiently make more money by targeting the right customers.

Confirm the website’s return policy: Before placing an order, carefully read the return and exchange policies of that online store. Sounds simple but very important because if you buy a dress for example, that is not fitted well on your body, it would be a waste of your hard-earned money. Thus it is recommended to purchase the stuff from the website that offers return policy. You can also think about shopping from an online store that provides at least 30 days to return the item. You can cash this advantage by ordering multiple sizes and brands, just pay one shipping fee and return those items that you do not like. It is suggested to buy the stuff from those websites that are offering free shipping services.

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