e-Commerce as a Marketing Tool?

• Every brick and mortar business has either thought of trying or has tried some sort of e-commerce solution with either fantastic success or not so hot results.
• If your business is in the latter grouping you may have been less than impressed with e-commerce for your business plan.
• To those business owners we would ask, did you have the right advice?
• Did your company take advantage of all of the tools available to make your e-commerce site a success?

If your answers, or the answers of your web designers to these questions are vague, you may not be aware of all of the new and exciting e-commerce tools available for your business. The days of posting a single static web page or shopping cart online and hoping someone would pass by and buy something are long gone. The Internet and e-consumers are much more advanced than they were just a few short years ago. Web 2.0 is more than a buzz term. Web 2.0 is bringing a new look and feel to e-commerce and online marketing as a whole. You must take advantage of all of the tools and resources available if you are to bring traffic into your e-commerce website. Traffic is the juice which makes your chances of converting a sale much higher.

How do get you the traffic to your e-commerce website

• is robust, professional grade e-Commerce shopping cart. In the back end, you will use a full featured back end to manage your inventory, orders, shipping, and customers in real time. Your customer’s payments are sent directly to your commercial bank account using the latest security technology.
• is an open source PHP based online shopping cart system. OpenCart is easy to use and is SEO optimized with a very nice interface. A great feature of OpenCart is that customers can write their own reviews of the products.
• is a professional open-source e-Commerce solution offering unprecedented flexibility and control. Magento is awesome, I would never believe it is an open-source project. It features clean urls and SEO from the start. Everything is designed in a clean and simple way. Magento also features: Unlimited flexibility, Completely Scalable Architecture, Professional and Community Support, and Smooth Integration with 3rd party apps.
• is very popular shopping cart. CubeCart V3 is free, with the exception that you leave their copyright notice in your footer. CubeCart has a large amount of payment gateways and shipping gateways. Their support forums are lively and many people contribute plugins to the cart. To use CubeCart V4 you must pay but it has many features that V3 doesn’t have.
• is another very popular online shopping cart, written in Perl/MySQL. It features a css manager so you can edit the look of your cart online. AgoraCart also features unlimited product options, up to 4 different tax zones at the same time, tons of shipping and payment gateways/options. The setup options range from a simple template based store to the integration of a complex visual design and support for program modification.
• is a user friendly, open source shopping cart. Zen Cart focuses on the merchants and shoppers instead of the developers. Zen Cart also supports multiple payment and shipping options, quantity discounts and coupons.
• is an online shopping cart that offers a wide range of features that allows online stores to be setup fairly quickly. osCommerce is backed by a great and active community. It also supports multiple currencies, allows customers to print invoices from the order screen, and has an easy database backup system.
• is a powerful, free PHP/MySQL shopping cart system that is easy to install and customize. StoreSprite has many features including automatic tax calculation, automatic delivery cost calculations, customer ratings and reviews and featured products.