In my last post I gave a review of the open source Magento cart.  CS Cart is a paid cart.  It costs $200.  In my opinion, it worth a lot more than $200.  I have an ecommerce site that has been in bad need of an upgrade.  One of my greatest fears, was if I upgraded to a different cart, my urls would change and then I would lose traffic.  Well, I found CS Cart.   (more…)

I’ve been looking around for a shopping cart that fits my needs.  I like free stuff so I generally search for open source products before I search for paid products.  I’ve played around a lot with OScommerce and stumbled across Magento Commerce a while back.  This is what I think about Magento: (more…)

Some of you know that most of my online income comes from selling tangible products online. Last year’s goal was to replace my wife’s income. We haven’t dived too deeply into our taxes yet to guage what our ending revenue was for 2006, but it looks like we have accomplished our goal. So how did we do it? Below are a list of things that can help your online store succeed.

• Learn Coding - Knowing HTML or any other coding language can really help you. It will save you money for sure.
• Gain Graphic Skills - Knowing at least a little bit about graphics can help you tremendously. An ugly site is like a gas station that is scarcely lit in a bad neighborhood, even if someone gets gas there the customer leaves as soon as possible.
• Learn How to Market - When I first started my online store, I began to frequent SEO forums. I slowly learned how to get traffic to my site. Now, my online store receives 100% organic traffic. This is what pays the bills.
• Find a Good Product - You may have all the marketing skills in the world, but if your product hasno profit margin because of a flooded market you will never make anything.  Stay away from knick knack dropshippers!
• Be Consistant - It is important to stick with one project.  The sites I have kept the longest have been the most rewarding.
• Have Great Customer Service - Your customer service will either send people away from your online store or send people to your online store.  I’ve had customers that had a bad experience because of a simple mistake.  But since we made things right, they keep coming back ordering more stuff and they tell their friends about us.

This list can be much longer that what it is.  These are just a few things that we have done.  You can read more throughout this blog and particularly in our Newbie Tutorial.

Do you have anything to add to this list?  Feel free to leave your comment.

During my sabbatical, I started playing around with osCommerce just for fun. I found a contribution that is awesome. It’s called the Simple Template System or STS for short. You can check out our store to get an idea of what the STS contribution can do. We aren’t 100% done with it yet, but you get the idea. To install the STS contribution it is better to start off with a clean osCommerce install with no other contributions added previously. The STS contribution is super easy to install. I’m not a coder and I had no problems installing it. After installing it, I created a template. I couldn’t get the Word Press theme template to work so I recreated a template of Webpuffs using plain HTML. Making the template is what took me the longest.  You could create your own template like I did, or buy a template.

The next thing you will discover is that the infoboxes leave little pics in the corners and that there are all those ghetto looking cartoon images by the page heading.  On my next post I will talk about how to get rid of the ghetto little cartoon images in oscommerce.  I have to go eat pizza.

Being a web developer, I am usually asked to make a website for a business. Business operate on money; therefore, usually some sort of selling is required. I have used both paypal and google checkout to process credit cards, there are advantages to both, and cons to both. Paypal has been around for many years, and I first helped my brother in law (Jon Lewis) start his online business using paypal. Paypal was good about fixing orders, but has been known to reject many credit cards due to its strict processing credit card checks. I have implimented Google Checkout on a site of mine, and am very pleased. Paypal is more popular, so more people are willing to use it. However, Google Checkout is as fast and efficient as checkout out gets. So here is the run down:
Cost to operated. Both paypal and Google Checkout offer similar fees for running a credit card. It is a percentage of the sale, no monthly fees, and both are fairly close in price. Google Checkout is a little bit cheaper, but probably not enough cheaper to be worth mentioning.

Ease of Implimentation. Paypal is about as easy as it gets, place a button, sell a product. This is good, but does not offer flexability. They do offer more advanced solutions as far as Integrating with your site throughout the entire transaction, however, these require https (encrypted) websites and custom shopping carts. Since it is usually more hassle than its worth for a quick ecommerce website, I will leave these features out. Google Checkout offers the same, place a button, sell a product. However, they also offer an intermediate step up for those without an https website. With this method, you form a shopping cart in your page, encrypt it with your merchant id (which nobody should know), and submit it via a button to Google. This allows you to guarentee nobody has altered your shopping cart in transit, since only Google knows the merchant id to unlock the shopping cart. This method of implimentation is what I recommend for a balance between functionallity and ease of setup. The third method is available, but requires a secure website.
Features. I am not sure how far paypal has evolved since I last used it, however, Google Checkout has an option for almost anything and everything. With the second method of implimentation, features such as return URLs, Modify Cart URL’s, Cart expiration date, varying shipping rates, tax zones, shipping location limitations (eg. All 50 States).

In my opinion, Google Checkout will gain ground due to its well developed, highly customizable, easy to work with interface. It clearly explains each of the 3 levels of implimentation available.

As I was about to offer a link to the 3 levels of implimentation, they have now split it up. Level 1 got put into its own category, so now, levels 2 and 3 are now levels 1 and 2 respectively. I recommend Implimentation 1 on this page Google Checkout Developers Center.

I have developed my own shopping cart system for Google Checkout. Ask questions and I will gladly answer as time permits.

Jeff