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Setup eCommerce website for your startup | Guidelines

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ecommerce-shoping-cartsSetting up a working eCommerce site by an organization is being easy nowadays but the largest obstacle that business owners and new businesses are facing is the process and groundwork they must go through from conceptualization to running state. As development of web development tools as well as web Content Management System (CMS) is increasing rapidly in current e-commerce market, businesses are likely to divide their task into different phases to setup their e-commerce website.

#1: Preparing Business Plan: Business plan is critical in developing the road-map and framework necessary to establish a successful business. A business plan for an online business should include the approach that will be used for financing, marketing, advertising of the business, fund management, success measures, and types of products to sell and so on. It is the must to identify the business model of e-commerce site to be developed as well in this step. You may also depict the working mechanism of your future product by using use case diagrams, flow charts, Data Flow diagrams etc. in this stage.

# 2: Gathering the Products and Building Inventory: Organization should be clear about the types of products or services that they want to sell online. Before beginning to set up eCommerce website, organization must also plan and organize all items, categories, subcategories, groups, and packages clearly. They may create tree view of catalogues or hire catalog management experts to do so. Whether the organization’s ecommerce store is fully virtual or have a physical location as well, they also need to have a decent sized inventory of products.

# 3: Building the Site and Shopping Cart Setup: Website building process starts with the wire-frame design that cover the overall layout of how it will look like and how website components will be displayed to clients as well as administrators. After wire-frame and layout design, organization will have two options; either to hire web developers to start project from scratch or to choose tools/software to do so. There are numerous eCommerce platforms such as BigCommerce, Magento, osCommerce, PrestaShop, and Shopify etc. where one can select the appropriate themes/templates for better design options and modules/addons to help implement their business logic as well.

Many organizations choose to go with an eCommerce platform where setting up the shopping cart will not be so difficult. Recent researches about eCommerce success recommended to use hosted shopping cart software as security of self-hosted shopping cart is less trustworthy to potential customers that may turn away them from website. This is a big factor to consider. Considering all these factors, essential steps to follow are:

Step 1. Create Categories and Subcategories:Categories and subcategories are used to organize the online catalog according to product type, brand, or any other organized system which allows customers to easily find products. Categories are also used as menu in majority of dominant eCommerce sites today.

Step 2. Adding Products to Categories and Subcategories:Add all products to into their respective categories. Manage associations between products and set product features like weight, color etc. Also, set price of product with shipping options, special discount offers if any, and activate inventory control to specify stock of product.

Step 3. Localization: Localization is main factor to grab customers’ attention and keep them engaged. Set up country specific currency, language options so that it will be easy for them compare and take quick decisions.

Step 3. Set up Global Rules

Shipping methods: Add shipping careers so that user may choose appropriate shipping options.

Shipping rules: Set shipping rules so that organization can apply shipping charge to products according time or region, country etc.

Tax rules: Add country specific tax rules. E.g. 13% VAT in context of Nepal.

Discounts: Set region or country or continent specific rules for discounts.

Handling charges: Set rules for additional service charges if any.

Step 4. Set Up Payment Methods and Ecommerce Options

Payment Methods: Organization may use verities of payment methods in their e-commerce site such as Pay by Cheque, Direct Bank Transfer, Cash on Delivery, Paypal, Credit Card payments, Debit Card Payments etc.

Merchant Account Information: Setup Online merchant account details after payment method selection, PayPal, and/or Account info of merchant for bank transfer or cheque payment etc.

Shopping Cart and Check out Options: Shopping cart must be user friendly and interactive.ecommerce-solutions-visrox.jpg Set up cart in such a way that it will give option for users to either “Continue Shopping” or “Proceed to Checkout”.

#4: Web Publishing, Advertising, and Marketing:After completing the whole eCommerce site setup and site’s bug-fixes, eCommerce site of organization will be ready for official launch. During and after the official launch, marketing and advertising of eCommerce site will play a vital role to increase traffic to site as well as to acquire new customer and get back past customers as well.

#5: Maintaining the Business:Regular content updates, taking care of technical aspects, make decisions about new and discontinued products, and providing customer service that will keep customers coming back for more. To increase customer flow to the site, organization should also market using techniques such as Social Media Marketing, Search Engine Marketing, E-mail marketing, sales and promotions etc.

All these above steps are essential and recommended to be follow by a newly established organization to set up their e-commerce website from idea conceptualization to running state.

Apple Launched It’s Own Mapping Product | Apple Maps

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The rumors were true. Among a boatload of announcements Apple introduced its own mapping product in June 11 as part of the iOS 6 update, which is available to developers today and will be available to the rest of the iOS-using public “this Fall.”

Announcement from Apple on June 11:

  • Maps with local search
  • Crowd-sourced real-time traffic
  • Navigation and turn-by-turn directions
  • 3D mapping with “flyover” animation
  • Siri integration (both on the search front-end and as the voice for turn-by-turn)

The basic maps UI looks similar to the old Google Maps UI but it’s not identical. However the 3D mapping looks almost identical to what Google demo’d last week.

Here’s what Apple just put out in a press release on Maps:

iOS 6 includes an all new Maps app with vector-based map elements that make graphics and text smooth, and panning, tilting and zooming incredibly fluid. New turn-by-turn navigation guides you to your destination with spoken directions, and the amazing Flyover feature has photo-realistic interactive 3D views. Real-time traffic information keeps you updated on how long it will take to get to your destination and offers alternate time-saving routes if traffic conditions change significantly. Additionally, local search includes information for over 100 million businesses with info cards that offer Yelp ratings, reviews, available deals and photos.

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During the keynote and in the press release said that local business ratings and reviews were from Yelp. However there are also “deals” and “photos.” Those may be coming from unidentified third parties. They might also be from Yelp (if so, what a boon to Yelp). We also know, though this was not formally announced, that Localeze is providing local business data.

Apple Maps will extend as well to the iPad and iPod Touch. There’s no Google Street View equivalent however.

Apple also said something at the end of the keynote that was very interesting. It said that it was going to integrate third party maps (map apps?) into Apple Maps because it wouldn’t be able to build maps for every scenario. It will be interesting to see how that’s implemented and what it looks like.

Will we have something like an app store for maps within Apple Maps? Or will there be a more “organic” integration of third party maps into Apple’s product? We’ll have to see what it means.

Right now we’re speaking in abstractions based on demos. We’ll have to get Apple Maps into our hands and use it in real world circumstances before we can truly compare it to Google Maps. From afar, however, it appears to be a very competitive product.

We’ll update this story as we discover more. But make no mistake, with Maps and some expanded Siri capabilities (or restored as the case may be) Apple is now in the search business.

Postscript: There’s no indication that there will be any ads or other promotional opportunities directly coming from Apple in local search/Maps. However the third parties that Apple is working with may be the onramps into Apple’s local results. There may also be some interesting and new SEO angles for Siri and Apple Maps that we’ll start to see over the coming weeks and months.

Public, Private, and Hybrid Cloud Computing | When to choose ?

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Public Clouds

A public cloud is one in which the services and infrastructure are provided off-site over the Internet. These clouds offer the greatest level of efficiency in shared resources; however, they are also more vulnerable than private clouds. A public cloud is the obvious choice when

  • Your standardized workload for applications is used by lots of people, such as e-mail.
  • You need to test and develop application code.
  • You have SaaS (Software as a Service) applications from a vendor who has a well-implemented security strategy.
  • You need incremental capacity (the ability to add computer capacity for peak times).
  • You’re doing collaboration projects.
  • You’re doing an ad-hoc software development project using a Platform as a Service (PaaS) offering cloud.

Many IT department executives are concerned about public cloud security and reliability. Take extra time to ensure that you have security and governance issues well planned, or the short-term cost savings could turn into a long-term nightmare.

Private Clouds

A private cloud is one in which the services and infrastructure are maintained on a private network. These clouds offer the greatest level of security and control, but they require the company to still purchase and maintain all the software and infrastructure, which reduces the cost savings. A private cloud is the obvious choice when

  • Your business is your data and your applications. Therefore, control and security are paramount.
  • Your business is part of an industry that must conform to strict security and data privacy issues.
  • Your company is large enough to run a next generation cloud data center efficiently and effectively on its own.

To complicate things, the lines between private and public clouds are blurring. For example, some public cloud companies are now offering private versions of their public clouds. Some companies that only offered private cloud technologies are now offering public versions of those same capabilities.

Hybrid Clouds

A hybrid cloud includes a variety of public and private options with multiple providers. By spreading things out over a hybrid cloud, you keep each aspect at your business in the most efficient environment possible. The downside is that you have to keep track of multiple different security platforms and ensure that all aspects of your business can communicate with each other. Here are a couple of situations where a hybrid environment is best.

  • Your company wants to use a SaaS application but is concerned about security. Your SaaS vendor can create a private cloud just for your company inside their firewall. They provide you with a virtual private network (VPN) for additional security.
  • Your company offers services that are tailored for different vertical markets. You can use a public cloud to interact with the clients but keep their data secured within a private cloud.

The management requirements of cloud computing become much more complex when you need to manage private, public, and traditional data centers all together. You’ll need to add capabilities for federating these environments.

Re-blogged From: Judith Hurwitz, Robin Bloor, Marcia Kaufman, and Fern Halper | Cloud Computing For Dummies

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