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.

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.