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Your Quick Guide To Online Shopping

There's the old adage "If you can't beat them, join them". If you're in the retail business, you could be thinking just that. In a previous article we talked about how retail figures were generally down, and a recent report from the CBI says that high street confidence is at a 22-year low.

Consumer spending is down, and it would appear that a greater chunk than ever of what's left is being spent online. Many traditional retailers are coming to the conclusion that you must fight fire with fire, and are turning to the internet to make new sales.

When you consider that by getting online you're opening your business to millions more potential customers, it's a tempting proposition. Remember, though that it's vital to do it properly. Get it wrong, and people won't come back. Get it right, and they'll return time and time again. By "it", I don't just mean your website, it's everything else, too: how you deal with enquiries, how quickly you despatch goods, how good your after-sales service is, and so the list goes on."

Setting up your own online shop is a daunting prospect for many people, so let's take a look at a couple of "shopping cart" options to consider.

A popular entry-level package is Actinic Catalog. Now in its seventh version, you can set up simple shops, accept online payments (after you've set up merchant account, which we previously covered), and process orders. All the information is stored on your own computer. "Catalog" generates web pages, which you need to transfer to your website. At £379 + VAT it's not bad value if you have the time and expertise to do it yourself.

My personal favourites are packages called osCommerce and Zen Cart. The "os" part stands for "Open Source", which can be translated to "free". You might think that being free it can't be any good. Far from it. Both are versatile, fully-featured, well-supported, easy to use, and utilised by thousands of shops worldwide.

Like Actinic, you can accept online payments from a variety of providers. All the information that osCommerce uses is stored on your webspace, and this has many advantages. It allows for customers to create accounts, track their orders, see their order history, and more. When you add, delete or edit products, the changes are made instantly, rather than having to upload new web pages from your PC. You also don't need to worry about losing information if your own machine crashes.

The standard version alone is excellent, and there are over 3,000 modules that be bolted on to add even more features. Having access to the actual code that runs osCommerce and Zen Cart also means that a developer with the relevant know-how can go in and tweak it to just what each individual online shop needs.

So there you have it - a couple of options to consider if you want to get your shop online.

Read more about what osCommerce and Zen Cart have to offer and gen up on taking payments online

Click here for a list of useful links

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