The Store Suite - a promising shopping cart initiative
http://www.kennisdelen.com/articles/1208/1/The-Store-Suite---a-promising-shopping-cart-initiative/Pagina1.html
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Door Auteur onbekend
Gepubliceerd op 1-10-2007
Some of you might already know the company Interspire from Australia. They are the makers of some very succesful webapplications that we like to use. These include products like SendStudio (advanced email marketing tool that is still easy to use), ArticleLive (blogging tool, you are looking at it right now!) and ActiveKB (a knowledge base tool).
Some of you might already know the company Interspire from Australia. They are the makers of some very succesful webapplications that we like to use. These include products like SendStudio (advanced email marketing tool that is still easy to use), ArticleLive (blogging tool, you are looking at it right now!) and ActiveKB (a knowledge base tool).
Just to get something straight from the start. You might be wondering why we are talking about software that we DVB MEDIA us for its customers. Would we not loose our competitive advantage this way? The reason is simple, we never sell our cusotmers a standard solution that they can obtain somewhere on the Internet, we value our customers so much that we will always add value to any product. If we feel that a product is great we should talk about it, creating more spin off for the makers of the software and thus establishing the grounds for future developments that will change the Interactive Internet world as we know it. Some products have been developed by such experts that there is no sound reason to develop something similar that will probably do less! Take that with you in your thoughts next time you are looking for a web development project, chances are your webdeveloper is doing the same but not telling you about it.
That said, you may understand why we are talking about a new development of a shopping cart solution that will have all you will need for creating your online shop online.
The Store Suite - an INTELLIGENT e-commerce product in development by Interspire.
I think it is fair to state that most people nowadays have thought about selling products online, it seems so simple. Nothing is less true! Creating an online shop is just as hard as managing a shop in the real world.You will encounter many of the same issues as in the normal world, think about where do you purchase your goods you want to sell, how should you market your site, what will you do with return goods, how will you handle shipping and payments, what about taxes. There are many variables that you need to think about before starting. So what do we have available in the online world.
If you have done some research on shopping carts or e-commerce solutions you must have found 1000's of results and possibilities ranging from free solutions to 100.000 Euro's and up. All of those shopping carts have their strengths and weaknesses, that's just the way it is.
Personally I've never liked products like OsCommerce simply because they always needed major redesigning and they never seemed to do exactly what they need to do. The Store Suite from Interspire seems to be different, here is why:
The product is currently in development, and the developers are asking major input from their customers and from end users. All the inputs are taken into account during this very intensive development process. You see their product change almost every day as they post updates on their development blog.
http://www.thestoresuiteblog.com
The Store Suite project has pretty much started by taking all the good things from other shopping solutions and creating them as the basis for their product. This means product listings running into product details, sorted by categories, taking the products into a shopping cart apply some discount if needed, pay for the goods and download or wait for shipment. Unfortunately this is just the very basic setup of an e-commerce site. The real value is in user experience, displaying the products according to your whishes on the fly, changing the look and feel /rearranging of the store every day as you would with a normal store, and maybe most important making sure search engines will find and index you!
There are always two important parts to an online project, the first being the contents located at your url address and the other being what is happening outside on the internet. If you love your store but no one is actually visiting you probably need to look at how you handle things outside of your store. Compare it to creating a store with the doors and windows sealed, no one knows what is inside and no one cares because there are a million others they can find. Also think about reviews for your store, are people saying nice things about your store?
The Store itself
Your store is what you make of it. As mentioned before in the real world you would rearrange your store all the time in order to get the best selling products in front of the nose of your store visitors, this is exactly the same on the Internet. Not only the products, but also the cash register, the news bin, coffee corner whatever you want to call the contents of your store. Take a look at one of the amazing features The Store Suite wil be offering: Click here to see the video.
Navigation
A store is all about clear navigation! get your paths layd out correctly and your customers will buy what they find. The Store Suite brings Web 2.0 functionality here as well, there has been a development of a tag cloud, navigation by importance instead of navigation by pre defined categories.
Customer contact
Your customers are your real assets if they are happy they will buy and if they buy chances are they will talk about it to friends who will in turn visit and buy. There is more you can do though, included in the development of The Store Suite is integration with one of the most powerfull tools you will ever use email marketing! Email marketing is more than just sending a bunch of newsletters to inform you customers about offers. Email marketing is all about making computers work for you. Think about auto responders. For example a customer is looking at a complicated product and requests information, you could set up a series of pre-defined emails that this visitor will receive from that moment on. A rule of thumb is that someone needs about seven contact moments before he/she will feel confident enough to purchase something from you. Perhaps first a teaser about the product, the next day automatically send him/her a more detailed description, two days after that send customer reviews, the day after perhaps even some more links to information on the product on the internet and finally blow him/her away with an offer they cannot refuse. Just an example of how you could use personalized autoresponders to communicate with your customer if you put in a little effort.
Also sending out weekly or montly offers about your store, new products, unique product offers etc will get the brain position in your customers mind that you need. Think about it, ask questions on how you would like to be treated and do it to your customers. Another thing you need to think about it is easier to keep a customer than to get a new one. Use all your communication skills and tools to establish and retain a good relationship.
Recommend products and product reviews
As you probably know and are used to by now before people buy something on the internet they will look for product reviews, or maybe even store reviews to make sure they are buying something that fits their needs. Who knows better than you what cross selling products should be for certain offerings. The Store Suite allows you to recommend products based on the products that are being viewed or purchased. Now the best feature in The Store Suite is that it will give recommended products in real time! Based on what other customers ordered, you know the thing you find on Amazon... people who bought this also bought... great feature if you don't need to worry about it, and that is what it all should be about, creating an online shopping experience that is intelligent, not only for the visitor but also very much for the store operator!
Comparing products
You like anyone else needs to compare different features of a product to come to a desicion about what product to buy, take a look at the comparison example from The Store Suite, this is something you will most likely only find in expensive shopping cart systems. But is is such a necessity.
Shipping
Shipping is always an issue for webshops. Think about how cheap it is to operate your webshop against the costs of running a real world store. The costs most shop keepers are forgetting about though is shipping! The customers are mostly not coming to you to pick up their goods, you need to bring the goods to them! This means that cheap products are a hard thing to sell online simply because shipping costs are to high compared to the products. So think about different channels to distribute your products, get value shipping services, offer your customers an option to pick up their goods at distribution points etc. Experiment! Luckily the integration of shipping options is very easy in The Store Suite. A lot of though has gone into this mostly forgotten part of the webshop and this has resulted in an excellent way of adding and or removing shipping options and shipment providers.
Technical stuff for developers on behaviour and looks
If you are a developer like me you will love the fact that Interspire creates all its products in such a way that you can modify the source code! So if you have clients that need modifications, additions or whatever to the core script, you can easily do it yourself. Every bit of their product has been coded in modules and it has proven very easy to modify the code the way you want it to look or behave. For the looks of the site, don't worry every bit is template based, code is seperated from content and even better also the layout is seperated. So from the administation area you will be able to modify looks and feel, css and even the basic coding all from seperated parts. If that isn't flexible I don't know what is.
If you are looking for more information, you can contact us, or go straight to the creators of this amazing development of shopping cart software at Interspire.
Just to get something straight from the start. You might be wondering why we are talking about software that we DVB MEDIA us for its customers. Would we not loose our competitive advantage this way? The reason is simple, we never sell our cusotmers a standard solution that they can obtain somewhere on the Internet, we value our customers so much that we will always add value to any product. If we feel that a product is great we should talk about it, creating more spin off for the makers of the software and thus establishing the grounds for future developments that will change the Interactive Internet world as we know it. Some products have been developed by such experts that there is no sound reason to develop something similar that will probably do less! Take that with you in your thoughts next time you are looking for a web development project, chances are your webdeveloper is doing the same but not telling you about it.
That said, you may understand why we are talking about a new development of a shopping cart solution that will have all you will need for creating your online shop online.
The Store Suite - an INTELLIGENT e-commerce product in development by Interspire.I think it is fair to state that most people nowadays have thought about selling products online, it seems so simple. Nothing is less true! Creating an online shop is just as hard as managing a shop in the real world.You will encounter many of the same issues as in the normal world, think about where do you purchase your goods you want to sell, how should you market your site, what will you do with return goods, how will you handle shipping and payments, what about taxes. There are many variables that you need to think about before starting. So what do we have available in the online world.
If you have done some research on shopping carts or e-commerce solutions you must have found 1000's of results and possibilities ranging from free solutions to 100.000 Euro's and up. All of those shopping carts have their strengths and weaknesses, that's just the way it is.
Personally I've never liked products like OsCommerce simply because they always needed major redesigning and they never seemed to do exactly what they need to do. The Store Suite from Interspire seems to be different, here is why:
The product is currently in development, and the developers are asking major input from their customers and from end users. All the inputs are taken into account during this very intensive development process. You see their product change almost every day as they post updates on their development blog.
http://www.thestoresuiteblog.com
The Store Suite project has pretty much started by taking all the good things from other shopping solutions and creating them as the basis for their product. This means product listings running into product details, sorted by categories, taking the products into a shopping cart apply some discount if needed, pay for the goods and download or wait for shipment. Unfortunately this is just the very basic setup of an e-commerce site. The real value is in user experience, displaying the products according to your whishes on the fly, changing the look and feel /rearranging of the store every day as you would with a normal store, and maybe most important making sure search engines will find and index you!
There are always two important parts to an online project, the first being the contents located at your url address and the other being what is happening outside on the internet. If you love your store but no one is actually visiting you probably need to look at how you handle things outside of your store. Compare it to creating a store with the doors and windows sealed, no one knows what is inside and no one cares because there are a million others they can find. Also think about reviews for your store, are people saying nice things about your store?
The Store itself
Your store is what you make of it. As mentioned before in the real world you would rearrange your store all the time in order to get the best selling products in front of the nose of your store visitors, this is exactly the same on the Internet. Not only the products, but also the cash register, the news bin, coffee corner whatever you want to call the contents of your store. Take a look at one of the amazing features The Store Suite wil be offering: Click here to see the video.
Navigation
A store is all about clear navigation! get your paths layd out correctly and your customers will buy what they find. The Store Suite brings Web 2.0 functionality here as well, there has been a development of a tag cloud, navigation by importance instead of navigation by pre defined categories.
Customer contact
Your customers are your real assets if they are happy they will buy and if they buy chances are they will talk about it to friends who will in turn visit and buy. There is more you can do though, included in the development of The Store Suite is integration with one of the most powerfull tools you will ever use email marketing! Email marketing is more than just sending a bunch of newsletters to inform you customers about offers. Email marketing is all about making computers work for you. Think about auto responders. For example a customer is looking at a complicated product and requests information, you could set up a series of pre-defined emails that this visitor will receive from that moment on. A rule of thumb is that someone needs about seven contact moments before he/she will feel confident enough to purchase something from you. Perhaps first a teaser about the product, the next day automatically send him/her a more detailed description, two days after that send customer reviews, the day after perhaps even some more links to information on the product on the internet and finally blow him/her away with an offer they cannot refuse. Just an example of how you could use personalized autoresponders to communicate with your customer if you put in a little effort.
Also sending out weekly or montly offers about your store, new products, unique product offers etc will get the brain position in your customers mind that you need. Think about it, ask questions on how you would like to be treated and do it to your customers. Another thing you need to think about it is easier to keep a customer than to get a new one. Use all your communication skills and tools to establish and retain a good relationship.
Recommend products and product reviews
As you probably know and are used to by now before people buy something on the internet they will look for product reviews, or maybe even store reviews to make sure they are buying something that fits their needs. Who knows better than you what cross selling products should be for certain offerings. The Store Suite allows you to recommend products based on the products that are being viewed or purchased. Now the best feature in The Store Suite is that it will give recommended products in real time! Based on what other customers ordered, you know the thing you find on Amazon... people who bought this also bought... great feature if you don't need to worry about it, and that is what it all should be about, creating an online shopping experience that is intelligent, not only for the visitor but also very much for the store operator!
Comparing products
You like anyone else needs to compare different features of a product to come to a desicion about what product to buy, take a look at the comparison example from The Store Suite, this is something you will most likely only find in expensive shopping cart systems. But is is such a necessity.
Shipping
Shipping is always an issue for webshops. Think about how cheap it is to operate your webshop against the costs of running a real world store. The costs most shop keepers are forgetting about though is shipping! The customers are mostly not coming to you to pick up their goods, you need to bring the goods to them! This means that cheap products are a hard thing to sell online simply because shipping costs are to high compared to the products. So think about different channels to distribute your products, get value shipping services, offer your customers an option to pick up their goods at distribution points etc. Experiment! Luckily the integration of shipping options is very easy in The Store Suite. A lot of though has gone into this mostly forgotten part of the webshop and this has resulted in an excellent way of adding and or removing shipping options and shipment providers.
Technical stuff for developers on behaviour and looks
If you are a developer like me you will love the fact that Interspire creates all its products in such a way that you can modify the source code! So if you have clients that need modifications, additions or whatever to the core script, you can easily do it yourself. Every bit of their product has been coded in modules and it has proven very easy to modify the code the way you want it to look or behave. For the looks of the site, don't worry every bit is template based, code is seperated from content and even better also the layout is seperated. So from the administation area you will be able to modify looks and feel, css and even the basic coding all from seperated parts. If that isn't flexible I don't know what is.
If you are looking for more information, you can contact us, or go straight to the creators of this amazing development of shopping cart software at Interspire.