Shopping Carts

Volusion V5: Worth The Wait

I found this info on osCommerce and thought it may be helpful to the readers here. Enjoy!

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Do you want to market your merchandise online as effectively and efficiently as possible and that too without wasting much time? Then, the right place for you to stop is osCommerce website.

OSCOMMERCE is one-stop software for you to advertise almost anything online, physical or digital products. This e-commerce website offers some of the best facilities for you to easily market your stuff and see immediate results. Apart from an easy set-up facility through a free Internet download for the newcomers, this software even allows you to customize your stuff as per the requirements of your clientele. Yes, you guessed it right, it’s an open source based e-commerce solution and GNU’s General Public License.

Accepting credit card payment online carries great responsibility. Merchants must take every step to protect the integrity of ALL the data collected from their customers. Why? You can lose your shirt if you don’t.

The credit card companies have banded together and created a standard for the use and storage of credit card data for ecommerce companies. This standard is called the Payment Cart Industry Data Security standard (or PCI for short). It applies to ALL ecommerce merchants both big and small. If you sell something online and accept credit card payment, you HAVE to be aware of the PCI standard. Why? If your store is found to be non-complaint, you can lose the ability to collect credit card payments, be targeted by a class action suit and face HEAVY fines. Believe me, it’s a whole lot easier being complaint.

Zoovy offers multiple sales channels all feeding off one product database.

I’m always on the lookout for cool new features that shopping cart solutions offer. I found one really cool one today. Check this out:

Zoovy's Multiple Sales Channel Feature

If you’re a niche merchant that sell your items via multiple channels, this solution is worth a look. You can sell your products on eBay, multiple online storefronts, Amazon, Yahoo Shopping and Pricegrabber. Pretty cool.

Cruising Zoovy's site, I didn’t find any pricing information or many details about their solution. Is it a hosted solution? What’s the pricing structure? It’s a classic ambiguous web technology site. You know, great looking site but it doesn’t provide information on what the company does or the products they offer. Maybe this is by design to get potential customers to call their 800 number? If so, it worked. That’s what I’m doing right now…

So far the members of the eCartReviews forum are batting 1000 in guessing what will be included in V5. This could only mean one of two things; the merchants have psychic powers or Volusion really listens to their client’s requests. The latest feature to be announced is USPS label printing. This will allow a merchant to create USPS shipping labels right from the admin panel. This will tighten up Volusion’s shipping interface and make life easier for their clients. Great feature!

It will make my life easier. Currently, I export the data from my three Volusion stores in Endicia and Dazzle to create pre-paid USPS shipping labels. Perhaps this feature will cut out that extra step and USPS shipping solution? Who knows? I’m sure more details will follow.

Hot off the presses from Volusion!

They are releasing details of V5 (version 5) slowly - one new feature a day. The first feature announced was abandoned cart tracking - with live cart records.

This is great news for all the former MonsterCommerce clients now with Volusion (there are many and ranks grow everyday). Many of these merchants grew to love this functionality while with MonsterCommerce.

It helps stave of issues with conversion. For instance, you can see if people bail out of the cart after the shipping charges are presented (price too high? Bye bye). Knowing how customers act at each step of a check out process is VERY handy. While you might not think this is handy with Volusion's one-step checkout, believe me - it WILL come in great for sales conversion tracking. Volusion merchants will be able to track and tweak and boast conversion.

Volusion is about to release version 5 of their award winning shopping cart solution. This is according to Volusion's customer forum, where the following was posted by a Volusion representative:

We are still testing V5 and it will still take more time to ensure everything is ready since we have added a lot. We appreciate your patience during this process. We are going to start sharing some of the new features coming in V5 tomorrow. We will only answer questions about each feature in the forums as we announce them. We will not be able to answer questions about new features over the phone, via live chat or via email. We are doing this because the forum moderators will be checking with the developers directly to ensure the answers are as accurate as possible. Thanks for your understanding.

A member of our forum has added an excellent post on how to reduce bandwidth by optimizing product images and website code.

Here's the link:

Optimizing Images and Code To Reduce Bandwidth Forum Post

I use this tool to check my store's load time:
Site Report Card

This is something that every merchant should be cognizant of. Slow load times can kill your sales conversion rate.

Thanks to Modular Merchant for making this great post.

Moving to a new cart can be a real pain in the neck. I’ve done it enough not to want to do it again. That said, if I were looking to move to a new solution - I’d make sure that the new carts has the importing tools to make the process as easy as possible.

I moved stores from MonsterCommerce to InstanteStore, Volusion and 3dCart. Of the three, 3dCart offered the easiest importing of my existing data. Volusion came in second but I had to reformat all my product images to get them to work with Volusion’s naming convention. Once that was done, everything else was a breeze.

3dCart was a walk in the park comparatively. The importing tool is powerful yet surprisingly easy to use. Order data was the hardest thing to move because of the different formatting of product data. 3dCart has since made this process a whole lot easier, especially when moving from MonsterCommerce. 3dCart can now import all your orders, customers, categories and products right from your dataport file right into a 3dCart store. This makes your move much easier and saves you hours of time.

Hosted Cart Solutions vs. Do-It- Yourself (DIY) Shopping Carts

If you planning on launching an online store, you’ll need a shopping cart. When it comes to shopping cart solutions, you basically have two choices; a hosted shopping cart solution or using a do-it-yourself solution. How do you decide which type of solution to use for your online store? Here’s some pointers.

Hosted cart solutions provided you with everything you need to open an online store (minus a merchant account). This includes hosting, software, updated and security. Examples of hosted shopping carts include the following: