Easy Way to Build an Online Store

You’ve got products or services you know will delight your customers. In fact, you’ve been selling locally for awhile now and are convinced you could sell like crazy online, too. Now, if only there was a way to get up and running on the Internet with an eCommerce site that looks good and works perfectly.

What’s holding you back? Is it the fact that you have no design experience and fear that anything you create will look amateurish and might not even function correctly. That’s going to ruin your reputation and send customers away for good. Getting shopping cart code up and running? Ha! That’s got disaster written all over it.

What you need is more of a turn-key solution with proven code and the flexibility to easily customize it to reflect your brand. Well, now there is just such a solution and you can even try it for free before you make any commitments.

It all starts with a library of professionally designed templates. No cheesy graphics or “I just got started with HTML” look. If you have a template you would like to use, you do have the option of doing that too. I’m guessing that you are just getting started in eCommerce and would be best off choosing from one of the pre-build templates that look like you are reputable and serious about selling online.

Let’s say you are selling your own creative T-shirts. You know that offering just one size or color limits sales. With this eCommerce solution, you can give your shoppers a choice by offering various sizes, colors, men’s or women’s fit, and even up-sells like custom slogans. Shoppers get to see what the finished product will look like and cost before they place their order.

How about other products like artwork, jewelry, stuffed animals, photography, specialized electronics, cell phone covers or unique tools? You can showcase your products with multiple images and views, including a magnifying glass so that potential buyers can get a close up view.

By the way, this solution also works for services like lawn service and gardening, ebooks or other digital goods, and subscriptions. If you’ve got it to sell, you can get it online quickly and easily.

You also know that many customers are now shopping from their tablets and smartphones instead of traditional desktop computers. No problem. You can have a mobile-ready version of your store up and running in minutes. It’s just an extension of the standard eCommerce tools. You can also get instant order alerts from your store while you are on the go. The mobile notifier for iPhone gives you instant notification when orders are placed.

This particular solution goes far beyond simple shopping cart software and a standard website. You also get business tools to let you easily manage orders, so you can track status updates from receipt of payment all the way to order shipment. Customers can even register for an account and look up their own orders.

There’s a lot more to this, too. You can capitalize on social media by offering unique promotions on blogs, Facebook, Twitter or Pinterest. Create your own affiliate program to expand your reach. Use autoresponders for targeted email campaigns to your best prospects. Offer discount coupons or free shipping. Whatever it takes to bring in those sales.

Are you ready to find out if this simple but sophisticated eCommerce solution will work for you? There’s no risk involved. Simply sign up for a 30 day free trial and see for yourself . If you like the way it looks and works, you can then decide to keep going with a monthly or yearly subscription. No contracts and no long term commitments. Plenty of experts available to help you along the way, although you may not even need them.

Try Cloud Website Load Testing Free

You’ve built your online presence. The question is whether you’ve built a house of straw, a house of sticks or the proverbial brick house. All websites look great when the server is just stilling there idling. The real test is when the visitors come in droves. Can your site handle the traffic? There’s only one way to know. You need to do load testing.

There are different ways to do load testing. BrowserMob offers some significant advantages for business users who take their online presence seriously. It’s reasonably priced, considering the value of lost business when your site crumbles under the load. That’s business you’ll never get back. Frustrated users are gone for good. This is especially important with the holiday season looming. Your worst e-commerce nightmare could be a ton of traffic, each user with credit card in hand, and nothing but a stalled out storefront or hideous 404 page staring them in the face.

How do you make sure your website is up to the task? Give it a serious test before the real onslaught arrives. BrowserMob gives you a choice of real browser users, virtual users or a combination of both. They use real browsers to create an experience that more accurately mimics the real user experience. Massive amounts of simulated traffic is generated by a cloud computing resource utilizing a huge pool of IP addresses.

Why not blast your site with up to 5,000 concurrent browsers? Simulate as many as 500,000 sessions with a maximum capacity of 6,0000 Mbps. Make sure you are doing it right with expert testing advice from the BrowserMob load testing and website monitoring experts.

What’s the best way to get started? Why, with a load test of course. If you like what you see, you can then move on to choose a service plan appropriate to the size of your operation.

Please note: The free website load test from Browser Mob is no longer available. Sorry.

Wireless Business Broadband Available In A Day

You’re opening a new store this week and everything is all set to go. Construction is done, the fixtures are in place and the shelves are stocked. The announcements have been sent to the media and all that’s left is the ribbon cutting. After that, let the profit making begin. Oh... NO... There won’t be any profit making because there won’t be any sales. The broadband service you were promised won’t be installed for another couple of weeks. Well, that’s what they said anyway. But they said that two months ago. What are you going to do without any connectivity? Is there anything that can jump in and save the day?

Yes there is and you’ll be glad you found out about it. Instead of grinding your teeth or just leaving the doors closed until your DSL or other provider can get around to bringing up your business broadband, get a wireless solution from Accel Networks. It’s highly secure and PCI/Visa compliant, so you can make cashless transactions with confidence. Data rates are typically 768 Kbps to 1.4 Mbps download and 384 Kbps to 512 Kbps upload with solid signals covering 90% of the United States. Best of all, it can be deployed in 1 to 3 business days.

A broadband wireless connection available in as little as a single business day? How come other providers don’t offer that. One word: Wires. No wires means no digging in the yard, stringing pole to pole, or fishing cables through the building. Those are things that take time. Avoid the wires and a good bit of the provisioning time goes away.

Accel offers a wireless solution that cleverly makes use of existing infrastructure. Most WISPs or Wireless Internet Service Providers are very localized and require direct line of sight to their towers. They likely will have to come out and put a dish or other external antenna on your building even if you can see the tower. Accel Networks doesn’t use proprietary towers like your local WISP. They’re using some or all of those cellular towers you see all over town. That's another reason why they need so little provisioning time.

Accel Networks has made agreements with the cellular carriers to use some of the data bandwidth that is available from every cell tower. But rather than limiting their options to one carrier, they’ve contracted with both CDMA and GSM carriers so that their service footprint covers 99% of business locations in the U.S., Canada and Puerto Rico. Their specially designed “Accelerator” customer location equipment is capable of 99.9% availability and network management from Accel headquarters. Installation takes less than an hour from the time your equipment arrives.

What can you do with a wireless network solution? The quick start option to have your business up and running in days, not weeks or months, is an obvious winner. It’s perfect for point of sale terminals in retail stores, quick service restaurants and hospitality providers like hotels and motels. It’s also a fast solution for disaster recovery in any business that can’t function without an Internet connection. Dial-up was once the answer to backing up broadband. But dial-up is just too slow for many applications anymore. Besides, the same disaster that took out your main wireline service might well have knocked out the phone lines as well.

The low capital and operating expenses per location for Accel Network’s wireless has given many businesses the incentive to upgrade from their old VSAT and frame relay connections or their current DSL and Cable broadband services. Accel is and can be the primary network service for restaurants, gas stations, banks, convenience stores and many other businesses. Some businesses have started with a panic call for quick start service and later decided to keep Accel Networks as their primary broadband connection.

Are you in dire need for fast and effective WAN network bandwidth at a reasonable price for a single or multiple business locations? Perhaps you’re just shopping around to see if you can do better than the high cost and unreliable service you have now. Either way, call the toll free number or enter an online inquiry for wireless business WAN bandwidth to get prices and availability.

My Store is Solid, Solid Like a Cactus

You want to port your retail business to the Web or start an online business selling products you know will fly off the shelves. So, what do you do? Rent office space and start interviewing programmers? Take the cheap-charley approach and build your own site using bargain software you found at the office supply store? Naw. What you want is a Yahoo! Store from Solid Cactus.

Solid what? Solid Cactus. That enigmatic name happens to be one of the top 500 fastest growing private companies according to Inc. 500 Magazine. Like Google, they happen to have their own restaurant to serve their 150 employees. It's Saguaro's Cafe. You might get the impression that Solid Cactus is a great business in Arizona. But it's actually been awarded the title of "One of the Best Places to Work in Pennsylvania." Pennsylvania? Go figure.

What Solid Cactus does is build Yahoo! Stores for their clients. They've designed lots of them. More than 3,500 Web sites built to date. Sure, you can go off and build your own store. But why take the hard road when you can get a professional result quickly with help from Solid Cactus.

A Yahoo! Store is an ecommerce platform offered by the same company that is a main player in the field of Internet search. What you get with a Yahoo! Store is a online storefront that can handle anything from a few to a few thousand different products. You get a shopping cart, tax and shipping calculator, gift wrapping options, and the ability to accept payment from credit and debit cards or PayPal. You'll be able to print invoices and shipping labels and use major carriers like UPS, FedEx, and USPS to get the goods to your customers.

Yahoo! Stores are built upon a platform called RTML or Real Time Markup Language. It was designed by Viaweb and later sold to Yahoo! as a means to create Web pages too complex for standard HTML programming. You can learn RTML to customize or modify your store pages, or you can let a developer such as Solid Cactus handle that for you.

Solid Cactus has taken the basic store templates that Yahoo! offers and added additional features. Some of the features you can get are multiple photos of your products on a page, reviews written by your customers, send-page-to-a-friend, display the money saved when buying from your store versus retail, randomly displayed best sellers, mailing list sign-up, randomly displayed testimonials, and LivePerson's live chat and contact center.

There are other enhancements designed to improve search engine optimization so you can be easily found on the Internet. Online marketing as well as website development is a key expertise of Solid Cactus. In fact, the owners of the company got started with their first Internet based store in 1994. That was long before the popular retailers you find online today were doing anything on the Internet.

Bricks and Mortar Apocolypse, Now?

The real world is in a pickle while the virtual world is humming along nicely. Could we be nearing a tipping point when the Internet finally does take over? Perhaps. If traditional bricks and mortar commerce does get a comeuppance, it may be for reasons we never expected.

Let's look at the evidence. Retail has been in something of a downturn for some time. But lately there has been an acceleration, almost a panic in some areas. The reason is the spiking price of gasoline. The quick run-up in gas prices this year has sent a cold chill up the spines of consumers. The more that chill gives them the shakes, the less they drive. The less they drive, the less they shop. Well, at least the less they drive to shop.

Shopping is America's real pastime. Shopping and buying are what keep the economy moving. If shopping grinds to a halt, buying will take a tumble and we might just "drive" ourselves into a economic depression - by not driving.

The problem is that we've structured our society on driving to get places. Look at any recent real estate development. It's a mile of houses followed by a mile of strip malls, a mile of offices, and tucked out of the way where you don't have to see them is a mile of factories. There aren't that many places now where you can walk to the corner pub, grocery store or even an ice cream shop. Forget hoofing it to any of the big box retailers. They carve out huge swaths of landscape so that an acre of store can have acres of parking. Movie theaters, sports fields, and even churches have all gone with the model of big buildings surrounded by huge fields of asphalt parking lots.

There's no getting from point A to point B without a car. It's too far to walk and, in most places, public transportation is spotty at best. Gasoline gets put in those cars every week or so. The cost of that gas gets put in your face. I'm not so sure that $3, $4 or even $5 pump prices are all that traumatic in themselves. It's the $50, $75, and $100 fill-ups that stop the hearts of motorists and start them thinking about changing their ways.

Driving is down over the last year by a couple of percent in the U.S. That's pretty significant considering that the population is increasing. What's happening is that people are less casual about cruising around, burning gasoline, and then hearing the gas station pump click up, up, up. They're thinking about their route and mentally planning paths that include the necessary stops without a lot of randomly going here and there.

That's smart, efficient and good for the environment. But it's not so good for retail establishments that benefit from impulse shopping. A shopper might not think "Oh, I should stop in and pick up a book," when their more efficient travel plan doesn't give them a chance to see your store and plant the thought.

But people love to shop, right? You bet. That hasn't changed. But now they're doing more shopping in front of their computers instead of behind the wheel. You don't get the touchy-feely experience with e-tailing, which might be overrated for a lot of products. That's especially true if you are just buying replacements. How much hands-on do you need to buy more office supplies? Furnace filters? Specialty toothpaste? I regularly order all of these online.

For major purchases, such as cars, appliances and computers, people are shopping online even when they buy locally. What might be thought of as product research is the process people used to go through visiting every retailer in town and talking to all the salespeople. Now they may make their decision online and then make a bee-line to the store with the best advertised price. Or they may decide to buy that new flat screen TV or cell phone online and have it delivered.

Many traditional businesses have seen this coming and opened parallel stores online with the same stock as you'll find in the retail establishments. Some, like Circuit City, give you the option of having your purchase delivered or picking it up at the store even though you've ordered online. Major chain stores have hedged their bets with the dual online/offline approach. If local shopping takes a dive, online shopping can take up the slack. Chances are that the products are stored in the same warehouse anyway.

That doesn't work so well for strictly local establishments that aren't part of a national distribution chain with a massive e-commerce support system. Many, if not most, local merchants have put up business Web sites without online ordering. These give locations, hours, phone numbers and perhaps current specials. They're the electronic equivalent of phone book and newspaper ads.

If the downward trend in miles driven continues, it could mean a come back for local delivery service. Instead of calling the local butcher or haberdasher like in the old days, customers may browse and order online. The merchant would then make delivery rounds, but in a updated version of the old horse cart. Think plug-in hybrid or natural gas fueled delivery trucks. This may sound like a zero-sum game, but it's actually more efficient for one delivery vehicle to run a circuit around town than have every customer drive to the store and back to pick up their one little order. If said deliveries are made in electric vehicles that are recharged from the grid overnight, fuel costs could be measured in pennies per mile.

This model is already working for some restaurants, sans the fuel efficient vehicles. The fancier ones often use SUVs that burn a ton of fuel. The little pizza shops still use beater cars that drip oil in your driveway. But both high and low end restaurants have made the jump to online ordering as a replacement for phone-in orders. Online, you have the opportunity to present a complete and up to date menu. No additional clerk is needed to handle the extra business because customers themselves take care of order entry.

If the idea of online ordering coupled with local delivery sounds like an idea that popped with the tech bubble of the 90's, it may have been that those pioneers were just too early. What's different now is that gasoline prices have gotten to the point where people no longer go running out on a whim for this, that and everything else. Couple that with highly efficient delivery vehicles to keep delivery costs low and the window of opportunity opens for more merchants to integrate online shopping with their bricks and mortar operations.

The other thing that's changed in the last 10 years or so is that consumers have become very comfortable with the Internet, including online retailing. Its not unusual anymore to be noodling around on a laptop computer while watching TV in the living room. You may well be placing an order at Amazon.com, while missing an ad for a similar product running on your local TV station.

There's no doubt that bricks and mortar retailing will continue to garner a major share of consumer spending. By supplementing traditional walk-in business with online shopping and perhaps free or low cost delivery, retailers can benefit from the Internet rather than see their business base erode to online e-tailers.

Fixed Wireless for Point of Sale Authorizations

Just about everyone uses credit cards these days. That means the credit card authorization terminal is every bit as important as the cash register for today's retail businesses. What helps to make for a fast and pleasant transaction experience could be the means of connection. If you are still using a dial-up terminal that shares a phone line with your office telephone and FAX machine, the dirty looks from your customers as they stand there and wait is probably all the encouragement you need to be looking for an upgrade.

T1 lines have come down in price dramatically over the past few years and are the broadband connection of choice for many small to medium size businesses. They may still be a little pricey for many smaller retail operations that aren't heavy users of the line. But what else can you get? Dial-up Internet access is universally available but hideously slow. DSL is not always available, nor is Cable broadband. Satellite is a better option, but it requires some serious professional installation work. How about wireless?

There are WISP or Wireless Internet Service Providers, but coverage is pretty hit and miss. You need a direct line of sight to the nearest tower. What would be really nice is something like cell phone service that seems to be available just about everywhere. Even better, how about a business service that uses multiple cellular carriers to give you fast, reliable access in over 90% of the U.S.?

Accel Networks offers just such a service. What they've done is to combine broadband wireless data services from the four leading wireless companies serving the United States, Puerto Rico and Canada. Chances are that there is one or more cellular towers providing reliable data service to your location.

These wireless services offer 3.5G, 3G or 2.5G performance, depending on the carrier. A 3 or 3.5G data service gives you 768 kbps bandwidth with bursts up to 1.4 Mbps. Upload is 384 kbps with bursts to 512 kbps. This is very similar to DSL and satellite performance. If you are in a more sparsely populated area, you'll probably get 2.5G service which still gives you 120 to 140 kbps download and uploads. That's far superior to dial-up and without the wait for modem connections.

Accel Networks claims cashless transaction times of 2 to 4 seconds using their network. They have also been certified by VISA for meeting all the payment card industry (PCI) requirements for data security. They'll ship you the hardware in as little as 3 days and you can likely get it up and running yourself in under an hour.

The Accel Networks fixed wireless broadband service is useful for general retail, quick service restaurants, table service restaurants, banks, fuel tank monitoring, hospitality services, pipeline monitoring, convenience stores, retail petroleum and other applications. In fact, this service is also used by companies for network continuity in the event that their primary WAN services goes down.

Are you in need of better voice and data connections for your business? Find out how little it costs for reliable, professional grade telephone and broadband solutions right now.