While there have been many successful ventures of online store that sell products purely via their web sites, many businesses are also beginning to setup online stores to compliment their brick and mortar business. Setup an online store and sell online has the following advantages:-
- The online store will serve as your showroom that opens 24 hours a day.
Even if the visitors to your site do not buy online, it serve well as an
online catalogue for them to browse. - If your site enjoy good position and ranking in popular search engines,
your sites will surely receive tons of quality hits that can be converted to
sales if the products that you are selling are attractive and competitive. - You will be able to sell products online even when you are sleeping.
- The online store has indefinite shelf space and you will be able to sell
as many products as you wish. - The online store is convenience to shopper. They can shop online 24 hours
a day with having to spend time traveling out of their home. - The shopper will also be able to browse and compare prices more
easily.
One of the E-Commerce Software that I find it easy and useful to build online store is ShopSite that allow you to build an online store and full function shopping cart system. It adopt a very simple concept of your building pages and it is easy to learn and it go through some simple steps that are described below:-
- Upload your product images to ShopSite. Your images can be of any filename
and you will be able to assign a name that is easy to remember to every
image that you upload. For example, your image file name may be 13925.jpg
and once uploaded, you can assign a friendly name such as "cameramodelxyz"
to it. In that way, you will have no problem tracing the images that you
have uploaded. For easy management, you can also upload those images in
separate folders.
- Once images has been uploaded., the next step is to add your products to
ShopSite. For each and every products that you have added, you will be able
to specify the image to use for each of them. ShopSite Pro 8.2 onwards will
help you to create thumbnail automatically. For each and every
products, there is checkbox allow you to select whether you wish to
have a more information page that will show larger images and more details.
- One products has been added, you can then commence to add your product
pages. When adding a page, you will be able to select the products that you
want to appear on that pages. You will also be able to specify the
navigational links to appear on the same page and add the necessary contents
as well. The addition of links will allow you to link all those product
pages together so that shopper will be able to browse easily.
- Once product pages has been added, you can then proceed to add content
pages such as FAQ, Terms and Conditions, Contact Information,….., all
following the simple step of Adding Pages. In that process, you will be able
to add contents as well as links that you want to appear on those pages.
- The final thing to do is to activate your payment gateway setting.
ShopSite support WorldPay , PayPal and many other methods. Just key in the
account information and enable the payment system that you wish to use
accordingly.
- ShopSite support all type of curreny and in the event that the currency
that you wish to use is not in the list, just upload a txt file on currency
on ShopSite folder on your server and add that currency in the file
accordingly.
- For the look and feel of the site, you will be able to select from a wide
selection of theme to use. There is also a place where you can customize the
header and footer of the site.
- Once the above are all done, just click the Publish Button to have Shopsite build all your pages in HTML
- That is about all and you can start selling online 🙂
One of the plus points of ShopSite is all the site pages will be built as HTML pages which is search engine friendly. In addition, for each and every pages that you add to ShopSite, you can specify the Page Title, Meta Description and Meta Keywords. Put in some effort to optimize your site for search engine by choosing the right keywords will surely serve to improve your site ranking among major search engines.
To use ShopSite either purchase the full license from ShopSite Main Site or purchase a Server Hosting Plan with ShopSite pre-installed for you.
ShopSite Main Menu
ShopSite Payment System Setup
Upload and Management of Products’ Images
Adding Products to ShopSite
Addition and Management of Pages
Theme and Color Layout Selection
Management of Header and Footer