eCommerce Selling Online
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Selling Online never been this easy and if you are going to open sell online, check this post because no coding and your items on Ebay. Online sales have essentially been growing year over year since the concept of selling products and services on the internet was conceived. According to Forrester Research, and despite recent economic hiccups, ecommerce in the U.S. grew by 11 percent in 2009 reaching $155.2 billion. At 1&1 they offer a fairly comprehensive product, the 1&1 eShop, which makes it very easy to set up an online store and run your ecommerce business. They want you to be able to participate in this booming trend and we believe our product offers our customers a quick (and relatively easy) way to get on board.
I would consider there to be 3 essential components to running an ecommerce operation:
1) The Storefront
The storefront is the customer facing side of an ecommerce operation, essentially the website. In the eShop we have a tool called the “ShopBuilder” to build, modify, and maintain the storefront. Technically, developers would refer to this suite as the CMS (Content Management System), but I am not really writing this for technical users. Our ShopBuilder is a wizard-driven, template-based site build tool that makes it easy enough for anyone with basic computer skills to build their storefront in around 10 minutes or so.
2) Applications to Manage Your Shop (Incoming/Running Business)
1&1 offers a control panel that provides a place where a “merchant” (a 1&1 customer running an estore) can do the following: See an overview of pending/completed sales, visits to your shop, and several other statistics
View messages from our development team, such as information about the launch of new features
Process orders and manage customer information
Create and modify products that you wish to sell
Configure your shipping options
Configure your tax settings,and much more
3) Tools to Promote Your Products/Services and Drive More Business
A good ecommerce suite will also supply you with some of the tools you could use to increase exposure for your shop. At the very least, your ecommerce provider should supply you with some suggestions on complementary products/services that you could use in conjunction with your ecommerce solution to promote your business.
1&1 includes several tools with our eShops that can help to increase your sales such as:
Integration with eBay auctions so that you can easily transfer items for sale in your shop to also sell them on eBay. Integration with several major shopping search engines such as Google Product Search and Shopping.com where you can put your products directly in front of potential customer using these portals, An e-mail marketing tool (only available in the two highest packages) to send out information to customers on your mailing list about new products you are now selling, special offers, etc.
Credits for major search engines (Google, Yahoo, etc.) to get you started with advertising online with PPC campaigns … as well as some other goodies. Our eShop packages start at only $9.99 per month and are an ideal solution for merchants that don’t have a strong technical background and need a ready-to-go solution without the worry of programming, installing software, or managing a complex hosting configuration.
We also DO NOT charge any transaction fees, so unlike some of our competitors we don’t take a share of your sales. We often run special offers as well, so take advantage while they last! In some future posts I will be going into more detail about some of the great features that our shops offer, such as our cool new coupon tool, so stay tuned … same Bat-Time, same Bat-Channel.
You can check out your new futher shops ecommerce plans here. See the offers
