Template Customization

Downloaded osCommerce, now what?

Posted on 24. Mar, 2008 by Dave.

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Intro: Two of our most popular products are osCommerce templates and CRE Loaded templates. Both are actually a combination of osCommerce 2.2 (ready built online store) provided by osCommerce.com and a unique template design from Foamers.net. Likewise we also offer professional osCommerce, CRE Loaded and or ZenCart templates customizations at affordable prices. In this article Tan Thomas offers as tips on how to customize your shopping cart as well as market your product.

Article: When you decide to go with osCommerce for your e-commerce site, you can simply take their stock layout and insert your information and voila! you have a completely functional e-commerce site ready for customers and sales.
If you’re like most e-commerce sites, however, you’ll want to go a step further than that and customize your “storefront” to make it better fit your product. If you are savvy in both the technical and marketing fields, this will probably be a no-brainer. If, however, you are an expert in your product, but not necessarily how to sell your product, this article is for you. It’s filled with tips to help you both design your site and well as market your product.

Design Your Site

1.Change your colors. You can go into your stylesheet.css file (in your catalog root folder) and simply change the colors from the stock layout. It’s amazing what a difference something as simple as a custom color layout can do for your website!

2.Choose a template. If you don’t want to start your website design from scratch, you can use a template that has everything you need for your site except the information.

3.Or, go even simpler. If you don’t want to change the complete template you can opt to change just one thing on the site. This could be the background, buttons or logo. Whatever you choose, just do something to make the site your own!

4. Improve your images. Spend some time learning image editing programs so that you can save your pictures in high quality with the smallest file size so that they both look great and load quickly. With the high speed of the Internet, most people don’t have the patience to wait for slow loading pictures and they may leave your site rather than waiting for the image to load completely.

5.Change the page titles. Make sure that you give each page a descriptive title so that when the page appears in the search engines it gives people enough information to get them to want to click on your link.

6.Put your self in your customer’s shoes. Customers do not like long drawn out checkouts. If you can get the information you need in two to three pages (including the confirmation of information page), your site will have an advantage over those sites that draw it out. The osCommerce forum has information on how to do this.

7. Get a design expert who is experienced with osCommerce. By installing STS Template system or some other equivalent, they can customize your shopping cart to anything. This website lists a series of osCommerce website which had gone through a serious make-over. http://www.efusiontech.com/E-Commerce-Projects.html
Market Your Product:

1.Make your site unique. This is a basic marketing technique and is sometimes referred to as creating a Unique Selling Proposition. Basically, this is a simple statement that tells people what makes your site and your business unique from other businesses, especially those in the same niche. Whether you always offer free shipping or guarantee the lowest prices, your unique selling proposition is what sets you apart from the rest.

2.Don’t forget to sell your product! Getting people to your site and getting them to stay on the site are important, but once they are there you need to SELL the product. You won’t be there to tell them about the items and they aren’t in a bricks and mortar store to examine the product themselves, so your descriptions need to do these jobs for you and the customer. Be detailed, be specific and be honest. Include who would likely enjoy the product and why they would need it. Instead of focusing on the details of the product or service, put some emphasis n the benefits.

3.Make your store more than an online entity. Give your customers a way to contact you. This includes a name, address, email and phone number. If they have no way to get into contact with you, your credibility with the customer declines.

4.Offer more than just the product or service. Don’t be afraid to add articles, tips and information related to your product for customers coming to your site. It will increase your credibility as well as give them reasons to return to your site even if they don’t have an immediate need for your product or service. Related to this is sending out a periodic newsletter that gives useful information, announces specials and sales and highlights specific products.
With just a few customizations your osCommerce store can be a unique site that fits your philosophy, product and needs. You can view samples of some oscommerce website from eFusiontech.com who has done over a hundred osCommerce implementation with customized skin and layout.

About the Author
The author is a designer working in Singapore

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The future of eCommerce store development!

Posted on 30. Jun, 2007 by Dave.

As a long time web designer I’ve dealt with any number of eCommerce options over the years. In general you’ve always had two major options:

1) You build and code from scratch. This required a great deal of knowledge in various coding languages in addition to the ability to design an attractive interface which will work within the construct of the website’s structure. 2) You pay a company with pre-built systems. This was not only extremely expensive but rarely allowed you freedom to create any sort of pleasing design as it would have to conform to their limited header/footer customization.

Well, I’ve seen the light now! The future is here and (unfortunately for people in “the business” like me) it’s unbelievably easy to do.

These free solutions are Open Source based online shop e-commerce solutions that are available under the GNU General Public License. They all contain a rich set of out-of-the-box online shopping cart functionalities that allows store owners to setup, run, and maintain their online stores with minimum effort and with no costs, fees, or limitations involved. Most of these Open Source solutions provide an e-commerce platform, which include the powerful PHP web scripting language and the fast MySQL database server. With no special requirements, they are able to run on any PHP 4.1+ enabled web server running on Linux, Solaris, BSD, Mac OS X, and Microsoft Windows environments.

Unbelievable right? Well,, it’s true and I’m loving it.

In addition to the obvious advantages of these open source stores, there are many less obvious benefits such as – Active user forums where you can get answers to most any question without dealing with charges or “canned responses” from a profit company. – The ability to change the design of your store nearly instantly by simply selecting a new “template” from within your administration panel – Countless free “add-ons” and “modules” which add all types of additional features to your store. – As the projects continue to grow and the stores improve you can upgrade, and of course the upgrades are free also.

In my opinion once of the greatest of the above features is the ability to change the design and/or appearance of your site with the ease of a few uploads and button clicks (ONCE YOU HAVE A DESIGN DEVELOPED). The most common complaint I found from OS users was the same one I’ve heard about other e-commerce packages. People weren’t aware of how much work would be involved in getting an original design put together. They would get to a certain point, hit an unexpected bottleneck, and be unable to keep going. The majority of the work involved in getting your store up and running was getting a design to function within the limits and restrictions of the store’s code. Every implementation will run into these problems, and everything takes longer and costs more than you plan for it, whether it’s proprietary or open source. There are now; however, easy solutions for this issue which will prevent you from getting overwhelmed. Many businesses on the web (example: http://www.bg-website-templates.com & http://www.bluegelmedia.com ) who focus on web template development have entered a whole new era in template design. They have begun development of stunning designs for Open Source eCommerce solutions such as OScommerce, ZenCart, and CRE Loaded (the most popular of these Open Source eCommerce solutions). This allows you to easily implement a perfect store design within minutes. While these design templates are not free like the eCommerce solution, they are worth the mere $50 average price, saving you weeks of frustrating design.

You can find more information on these Open Source eCommerce Solutions at their hub sites. Just type in the OS solution name you wish to research into your search engine and their home pages will show up. The most popular solutions are ZenCart, OScommerce & CRE Loaded. But there are many other ones out there to choose from; however these three have proven themselves over time and have such large user bases and support groups that I would recommend trying one of them first before attempting to delve into lesser known solutions.

To sum this all up. While large companies will always need a custom built solution for their online stores, the average small business no longer needs to spend five or ten thousand dollars to have a quality store developed. The use of a free OS solution along with an inexpensive design template will have you selling online for pennies on the dollar compared with a custom built store. Even if you don’t feel you have the skill set to work with the OS solutions, you can hire any competent developer to implement it for you. Sure you’ll be charged, but the price will be a small percentage of what you would have paid.

About the Author
Written by Gene Torrey Webmaster/Lead Designer.
I have spent nearly seven years in the pursuit of how to make high end websites using small business resources. This article may be reproduced if all content, links and byline remain intact.
Ecommerce Web Templates can be found using this link.

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An Introduction To Ecommerce

Posted on 01. Feb, 2007 by Dave.

Many people new to websites and/or ecommerce are confused at the in and outs of ecommerce. Even many people who are fairly adept at scripting can set up a store using some popular package such as OSCommerce and then are left stumped by the idea of making it work with a payment gateway to actually collect money and put it into their account.

In this article, I will give a brief overview of how the system is set up to collect your money. I will then discuss briefly what to look for in evaluating payment gateways. As usual, I will keep this basic and understandable just as I do with all of my articles.

The Basics – How Funds are Collected

Ecommerce simply refers to the practice of shopping online. From the site owner’s perspective, it entails collecting funds from sales transactions on their website and depositing that money into the bank. In order to collect funds, you need to have a merchant account and a payment gateway (discussed below). Basically, when a person enters their credit card number on a website, the card number and buyer information is sent to a payment gateway. This is done securely. The payment gateway will interface with a payment processor to check availability of funds as well as any other criteria set for accepting transactions. If the funds are available, the payment processor will then deduct the funds.

The payment gateway will then report back a successful transaction to the merchant, at which point the merchant’s shopping cart system will respond by displaying a ‘Thank You’ type message to the buyer. Funds will sit until the transaction is settled, which means the funds are collected and deposited to your bank account. Until a transaction is settled, the transaction will not post to your bank account and the corresponding debit will not post to the buyer’s credit card account.

CRE Loaded templates
CRE Loaded templates are developed for CRE Loaded ecommerce system. CRE Loaded system is based on the osCommerce system. You will need about five minutes to switch your online shop to one of our professionally designed CRE Loaded templates.

Each week we update our collection with a couple of new CRE Loaded templates. That is why we recommend that you check our site for fresh CRE Loaded templates regularly. To use our CRE Loaded templates we recommend upgrading to version 6.2.

Merchant Accounts

A Merchant Account is a special type of account specifically for online retailers. They are designed to allow non-POS (point of sale) transactions using credit cards, or transactions where you don’t have the person’s credit card in hand. In other words, you don’t have a card swiper. A merchant account is not the same as a bank account. It acts as a go-between between your payment gateway and your bank account, accepting funds from credit cards which are then deposited into your bank.

A merchant account is a relationship based on trust between you and the issuing bank. The bank takes funds from the buyer’s account and deposits into your account. A payment processor takes care of checking for availability of funds and debiting from the credit card account. The bank issuing the merchant account is trusting that you will fulfill your end of the transaction by providing the product or service that the buyer purchased.

In case where this does not occur, the buyer can dispute the transaction. This puts the issuing bank on the line because they are then obligated to return the funds to the buyer’s carda chargeback . Therefore, merchant providers are taking a risk in allowing a merchant to take credit cards under their name.

The organization providing your merchant account will do underwriting on the account when you apply to check your credit. If you have a history of too many chargebacks, you may be denied. In fact, too many chargebacks can result in you, as a merchant, being put on the Terminated Merchant File also called The Match File. This is a blacklist which will effectively prevent you from ever receiving a merchant account again.

Payment Gateways

A payment gateway serves as the front end to your merchant account, allowing you to manage funds, transactions, and the like. It also serves as a connection between your website and your merchant account. It takes data submitted via your secure order forms and presents it to your processing bank. The processing bank then approves or declines the transaction and sends its response back to the payment gateway. The payment gateway then turns around and provides this data back to the merchant for appropriate handling of the transaction. A payment gateway, then, does not offer services such as merchant accounts or shopping carts, although some of the larger-known gateways do provide such options as value-added services.

Fraud prevention is a big one because, as stated above, too many fraudulent transactions will result in chargebacks which could end up putting you on the Match List and your merchant account closed. Some of the common fraud detection mechanisms are Address Verification AVS which compares the customer’s address with that on file with the issuing bank, CVV2 which makes use of the 3-digit security code on the credit card 4-digit on American Express cards.

Most gateways will provide instructions on how to interface with their servers from your web store. Most gateways offer two methods of integration.

One method is to have your site POST a form to the gateway’s server which is pre-populated with your customer’s information. At that point, the customer will provide the customer with the payment form which allows them to type in their credit card number in a secure environment. After processing occurs, the customer is then routed back to your website along with the results of the transaction. Your site again takes over the process.

This method is usually easier to set up for site owners and it also means the site owner does not need to purchase their own SSL certificate “allowing secure transactions on the site itself”. The tradeoff is that you do need to send your customers off of your website for payment collection. Many gateways offer ways to make the payment form look like your website using customized headers and footers, but the fact remains that the visitors are leaving your website.

The second method is totally invisible to the customer. If the site owner has an SSL certificate, they can set up security on their own site. This means they can host the payment form themselves, totally customizing it to their website. When the customer submits payment, your site will securely and invisibly submit the information to the payment gateway.

The payment gateway will do the usual processing and then invisibly send the response back to the merchant’s website, allowing it to respond properly. From the customer’s perspective, they never left your website. And they never did. This type of setup requires an SSL certificate as well as access to the CURL library.

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