Small Business Blog

Amazon has launched a new ecommerce solution designed for online retailers who want to launch their stores on a shoestring budget. The solution, called Amazon WebStore, allows for the creation of a full featured, branded ecommerce site with absolutely no start-up costs.

Like other subscription-based sites, Amazon WebStore uses templates and widgets to jump-start the site design. The user, however, has a substantial amount of control over the site’s look and feel. Custom images, java script and CSS can be implemented within the templates. Template master pages can be modified at any time, so that site-wide design changes are applied quickly. (continue reading…)

Payvment is quietly attempting to revolutionize online shopping with a new take on the shopping cart. The Web-based cart is pitched on two main features: easy installation and the ability to reduce cart abandonment. Those two features alone can snag the attention of any online retailer, but Payvment still has much work to do before it’s ready to compete globally.

The good

Cost. The Payvment cart is free to use. While there are other free shopping cart scripts out there, none install with a single snippet of code. This aspect of the Payvment solution is likely to appeal to smaller online merchants who don’t have an in-house or on-call webmaster.

Facebook integration. Payvment makes a Facebook storefront app, which can be integrated with its Web-based shopping cart. With the Facebook app, merchants can quickly install a storefront on their Facebook page; this provides maximum visibility for the products and an easy shopping experience for potential customers. The Facebook storefront can also be used on a standalone basis, which may appeal to online retailers who already have another cart system installed on their site.

Design-friendly. The cart can be installed to an existing Web site without making major changes to the site’s design. Visually speaking, the primary changes would be the addition of “add to cart” buttons next to the products. The shopping cart itself remains hidden until a customer clicks on an “add to cart” button; at that point, a pop-up appears to show the customer what items are in the cart. The customer can click a check-out button on the pop-up whenever he’s ready to complete the transaction. (continue reading…)

According to a recent survey by Compete Online Shopper, free shipping offers can and do impact consumers’ decisions to purchase online. Further, free shipping also affects customer satisfaction. The presence of shipping costs, particularly on small purchases, creates bad feelings with consumers. But free shipping offers make your customers happy and encourage them to purchase more.

Key takeaways from the survey include these data points:

• 93% of respondents said that free shipping offers encourage them to buy more.
• 66.6% of respondents said they’d increase their online purchases if returns were free.
• 67% of respondents said they buy items in stores to avoid shipping costs.

Bottom line: absorbing the cost of shipping your customers’ orders can pay big dividends in the form of happier customers and bigger orders.

See the survey data here.