“If your business is not on the internet, then your business will be out of business.” – Bill Gates.

These simple words of wisdom are quite enough to set the tone for your E-Commerce venture. As a matter of fact, being on the internet is not quite enough; the virtual world is pretty much like the real world, you could be anywhere and no one might ever find you.

So, the idea is to be where you can be seen and to make sure that people adore you when they see you. The internet of things is not an affair of the millennial crowd. Yes, your business might not cater to the Gen Y but that doesn’t mean that you should not have an eCommerce website.

Even if you are running successful offline retail units, the situation may soon implore that you move online because the consumers are becoming more comfortable shopping online day-by-day and you do not want to disappoint them.

There are plenty of E-commerce platforms that can help you launch your business on the web but as it is said earlier, it is not enough just to be on the web. Your choice should be in accordance with your requirements and should help you create the desired experience for your existing customer base and also to expand it. Here are some top E-commerce platforms that offer you a wide range of themes and the flexibility to build a great experience for your consumers.

Top 6 E-Commerce Platforms

1. Magento

Magento has come up as a popular e-commerce solution for big and small enterprises alike. You can download and install it to your server for free. Magento is pretty intense on features, so much so that you need to host it continuously. It is for this reason that Magento is chosen by various massive retailers including Musikshopen.com, Shoprite.com.au and Petsworld.in. If you can use it to effect, your products will roll.

• Perfect for novices with no technical knowledge and experts alike
• User-friendly admin area to set the basic store easily
• Highly scalable, and thus allows you to scale your store from 100 products to 1,00,000 on the go.
• Provides you with built in SEO support and newsletter management.
• Allows you to receive payment through multiple gateways.
• Optimize your site for mobile viewing.
• Handles customer service, coupons, gifts and more…
• It manages your inventory and handles shipping charges.

Being loaded with so many features, Magento has certain cons too. The backend development of Magento is pretty complex and takes real expertise to manage this particular platform. Fixing things may further demand professional technical assistance.

This user-friendly e-commerce site comes for free but you can, of course, buy the enterprise version for around $15,000 per year and Magento packed with all the support you may ever need comes at roughly $50,000 per year.

2. BigCommerce

BigCommerce empowers your business with plenty of great e-commerce store management features along with easy online payment facilities. All you need to do is sign up and set up your e-commerce store to your heart’s content with the countless customization features on offer.

• Taking care of orders, managing and adding products, tracking analytics – this all is fairly easy in BigCommerce.
• It secures your web store with top of the grid security features.
• Offers you an in-depth insight on analytics and statistics.
• BigCommerce is well equipped to deal with sudden spikes in your traffic.
• It integrates with PayPal and allows credit and debit card transaction and customer privacy is ensured as the checkout is done via SSL.

BigCommerce offers Standard, Plus, and Pro packages for $29.5, $79.5 and $199.5 per month respectively. While the Standard and Plus packages are fit for growing business, the Pro level subscription is great for big enterprises that deal with a lot of traffic and a large number of products. For the top features, you can go for the Enterprise package that is custom priced according to your requirements.

3. Shopify

Shopify is a one-stop e-commerce solution for beginners and veterans alike. The best part is the simplicity and cost-effectiveness it offers you. It is truly multipurpose and allows you to set up a store real time fast. You can start selling an unlimited number of products online through Shopify in a matter of a weekend. Let us take a deeper look –

• You get a working core platform straight away; you can obviously twist and tweak it to your liking, yet you get a well-structured shop effortlessly.
• The platform optimizes your store for viewing on mobile or tablet.
• Shopify integrates with Paypal; allows you to receive online and offline payment from multiple gateways. Bank transfer, cash on delivery, credit and debit card payments- you can allow your customers complete freedom if it suits you.
• Just change the color to match your company colors, edit the texts, put the pictures and prices; you are all set to fly.

Buying a platform on Shopify does not drain your resources. You can avail the basic facilities to start off with for $29, for intermediate and advanced features you need to spend $79 and $299 respectively. Most importantly, it is completely worth the expenses.

4. Volusion

Volusion is an ideal e-commerce solution to help your company with all the technical support needed to scale and grow. It has an easy to use interface that does not require loads of experience building e-commerce sites to get the most out of it. If you are just starting out, Volusion can be a worthy friend.

• Volusion is pretty easy to handle and works fine even for those who have no ecommerce experience.
• It has an amazing inventory management system.
• Volusion helps you build a complete website, integrating both e-commerce and non-commerce parts.
• You can choose from more than 300 responsive designs.
• You get 24/7 support, dedicated account managers and built-in marketing & SEO tools.
• You can manage your store on the go through iOS, Android and smartwatch apps.
• It accepts payment through debit and credit cards, PayPal and Amazon Payments.
• With advanced inventory management, secure hosting, security and easy order processing, Volusion is quite a superstar when it comes to e-commerce development services.

The only drawback is you cannot sell unlimited products through all the subscription packages. Only the premium pack worth $135/mo allows you to sell unlimited products.

Other packages are Mini worth $15/mo Plus $35/mo and Pro worth $75/mo.

5. 3dcart

3dcart gives you access to an advanced structured store that can handle thousands of products without any experience or site building skills. This feature-rich e-commerce platform has powered more than 23,000 stores around the globe and offers you its services without making you spend a fortune.

• Its unlimited storage allows you to handle massive catalog on the go.
• Hundreds of designs to choose from and all designs optimize for mobiles and tablets.
• It handles order management and processing.
• It is marketing and SEO friendly and also supports customer reviews.

You can avail the services through Mini, Starter, Professional, Professional plus and Power plan packages worth $19.99, $35.99, $65.99, $99.99 and $129.99 per month respectively.

6. Big Cartel

Big Cartel is a great platform for the creatives like musicians, artists, and designers to sell their goods directly to the fans. It is way easier to use than most e-commerce platforms and you can get it running in a very short amount of time. While being super simple and user-friendly, Big Cartel is not as high on features like other platforms, but if it is perfect for your niche, it indeed is a great tool.

• Big Cartel is perfect for those who are looking for a simple ecommerce store without much functionality. This works in favor of small ecommerce store owners, but might be frustrating if you are looking to base your store with 1 million products on it.
• It tracks your inventory and manages your orders.
• The feature-light approach of the platform is otherwise well-supported by in-built automation tools including time-sensitive discounts, pre-orders and other functions.
• It lets you sell in person and sell on Facebook.

You can avail Big Cartel for free forever, provided it limits you to 5 products and cancels some features. The paid packs are expectedly cheap. You can buy the Platinum, Diamond and Titanium platforms for $9.99, $19.99 and $29.99 respectively.

Time for the conclusion and some borrowed wisdom

The ‘E’ in e-commerce is for anything but Easy. So, you should be willing to handle your online business venture with patience, care and love. Understand what you need and create a vision of your desired destination and put the strong foot ahead. In short – choose your Ecommerce development services well and pour your heart into beautifying your store and perfecting your services.

Way to go entrepreneur!!!

The post 6 E-Commerce Platforms That Can Make Your Business Fly appeared first on Digital Marketing Agency - TIS India Blog.

As the quote goes:

“You don’t just need to have a website; instead, you need to have a website that sells!”

With 191.1 million US online buyers, now is the right time that you invest in an e-commerce store and be a part of an ever-growing industry, which is expected to hit $491.5 billion by 2018 in the US itself. Whopping, no?! But all of your dreams can be crushed to trash with the wrong web design of your e-commerce store.

Web designing has a huge impact on any e-commerce website which can make or break your business. Simply estimate the importance of web design with a simple statistic revealed by Kinesis Inc. which stated that users are said to form an opinion about your website in the first 0.05 seconds.

So what do you think is going to impact their decision? Undoubtedly, content is king, but 0.05 seconds is just too short time span to even notice that. What catches the eye even faster is the kind of web design, interface and experience your e-commerce store is providing.

When the designers entail all the best web design practices in the creation of an e-commerce website, only then your website stands a good chance of competition with the rivals that are barely one ‘click’ away.

You need to assure smooth navigation and a very user-friendly experience to the consumers of your e-commerce website. But is it just about navigation and user-friendly experience? Definitely, no! Let’s discuss more on what actually are the best web design practices!

Web Design Best Practices

If you want the e-commerce website to achieve the business goals, then being the web designer you should offer smooth and seamless shopping experience to the users and deliver quick, easy steps for purchasing and payments.

Try to avoid the common mistake of focusing on the embellishment of the website instead of working on its practicality and usability.

While crafting the e-commerce website design, make conversion rate your priority and not the beautification.

Here are 10 web design best practices for your e-commerce website:

1) Make your web design structure easy and simple

You should always design the e-commerce website in such a way that the web design structure does not seem complex to the users.

The whole layout and navigation to pages needs to be uninterrupted. The users expect to access the website by simple clicks and their experience should be good for them to return to the same website. By keeping your web design structure simple and uncomplicated, you can attract plenty of users to surf through your site and engage in seamless shopping.

2) Keep call-to-action buttons and concise sign-up forms in your website

Okay, so now the customer is interested in your products and services, all thanks to the catchy landing page that you presented. But, now what? How should your customer take the transaction ahead?

You need to make call-to-action buttons stand out in your website. These call-to-action buttons need to grab the attention of the users at once.

The sign-up forms that you add to your website should be designed as a short and concise form where the user only needs to enter the e-mail id, contact number and set a password. It is unnecessary to drag the sign-up forms by asking for address, occupation, etc.

As per kissmetrics, 23% of the users will not think twice about abandoning their shopping cart if they are asked to sign up at the time of checkout! It is highly recommended to keep it as simple as possible, and under such circumstances, offer your customer with the facility of the guest account.

3) Integrate breadcrumb navigation to your website

You need to integrate breadcrumb navigation to your e-commerce website in order to keep the user glued on to your site.

The user should be able to view all the pages that are needed to be navigated for the entire payment process for any purchase. If breadcrumb navigation is not designed by the web designer, the user fails to know how many pages are left for the payment process and might ditch the thought of purchasing any product from your website in the mid-way.

The user might get a misconception that your e-commerce website stretches the payment process unnecessarily long. If breadcrumb navigation is properly designed, then the user can even go back to few pages for editing the incorrect entries made in the earlier payment pages.

4) Add unique content to your site based on time and seasonal trends

Content is one of the main tools of web designing that can drive the maximum online traffic to any e-commerce website. As per a report by Hubspot, you can generate 3 times more leads as compared to traditional outbound marketing and that too for 62% less costs!

It is highly recommended to add unique and engaging content for the products available on your website highlighting their utility. Make it engaging by providing proper descriptions of the product and by inserting keywords.

You can add product content to your e-commerce website depending on the time and seasonal trends as well. Suppose Christmas is approaching, you could put content about the products highlighting their association with the festival. Suppose the winters are a few weeks away and you want to lure customers to your site. Spice it up with some quirky and unique content and see how users continue to stream into your website.

5) Make use of browsing history

Don’t we all love when we are presented with a complementary suggestion of T-shirt by an e-commerce store after taking inspiration from our previous browsing history? We all love that gesture, don’t we?

You should make use of the browsing history for better individualization. The e-commerce website should be designed in a way where the user can use the browsing history for viewing a range of related products.

6) Decide on using cards for your e-commerce website

Using cards for an e-commerce website is a new trend that has plagued the web designing world. Creating web designs around cards are extremely beneficial.

Cards are highly responsive as they customize according to the size of the displaying platforms they are viewed upon. The cards can get smaller and larger depending on the screens. Nowadays e-commerce websites are busy in mobile marketing so they need cards that work well on mobile devices. Cards make it possible for the web designs to be viewed freely on the mobile screens without any complications.

7) Avail ‘material’ design or ‘flat’ design

Confused as to what material and flat designs are? Let’s start with flat design first. Flat design, as the name suggests, is not designed keeping the dimensions or axes in mind. On the other hand, the material design is designed keeping the z-axis in mind and is multidimensional. While the flat design is a perfect choice for simple websites, the material design is highly preferred for complex ones.

Both of these designs are very user-friendly and easily comprehensible. So the web designer can highlight the primary part of the design which entails in the products and then proceed with the designing of the other factors like branding, navigation and other such elements.

8) The website should be fast enough

Users get pissed if they are kept waiting for even a minute, for the website to upload its pages. Speed is everything that matters these days. As per Econsultancy, 47% of the people would expect your web page to be loaded in 2 seconds. Catch the nerve: 2 seconds!

If the speed of your website falls, the sale and revenue generation of your e-commerce website also drops simultaneously.

So in order to keep the users glued on to your e-commerce website, it is highly recommended to craft web design that is well-optimized with high-quality videos and images such that they are not consuming too much bandwidth and that the website’s speed is not compromised.

9) Add well-designed checkout experiences to your website

In order to create a successful e-commerce website, a well-designed checkout experience should be added to the website. Many web designers overlook this checkout experience part and thus, users do not intend to return to their website.

When the user chooses the buy button to proceed with the purchasing process, the design should be easy, smooth and the navigation should be uninterrupted. You need to make sure of the high speed of the checkout experience. Delay of few seconds may result in a tremendous loss. The forms should be simple, uniform from page to page and easily understandable by the users. You need to add progress bars so that the users are well-informed about their status. It is also advisable to the web designers to include a summary of all the products that the user has decided to purchase, the breakup of price, taxes if applicable and discounts in the checkout experience.

10) Use eye-catching typography for your website

Several times it is seen that web designers do not pay attention to the typography of the e-commerce website. But it is very absurd to undermine the effect of typography in web designing.

The typography needs to be eye-catching for grabbing the eyeballs of millions of users. The color schemes, background color, font size, font style, etc. are all parts of the typography of any website.

Just the way content is important to lure users to the website, the same way excellent typography is responsible for plenty of users streaming into your e-commerce site. The content needs to be readable and the legibility of the text should be great.

The users should be able to comprehend the text immediately. For better typography, you can use Adobe Kuler for trying out different color schemes set against different fonts and style of the text.

The ten web design best practices have been laid in front of you. So are you wondering that mobile is not in the game? Well, having mobile responsive websites is a necessity today, and it goes without saying that your website should be responsive by default!

Designing a flawless e-commerce store that converts and sells is no child’s play. You need to be an expert and professional in the field, and this is when e-commerce web development services come in the picture to raise the sales of your website.

To end it up, it is not only about beauty and looks of your website; it is more about conversions and sale. It would be like an icing upon cake if you can hold both things together, but if not, conversions should not be compromised for the beauty!

The post 10 Web Design Best Practices For E-Commerce Website appeared first on Digital Marketing Agency - TIS India Blog.

So, here the main point of focus is to explore the tips that can help in creating visually appealing and professional looking eCommerce site because a perfectly designed online store is a guarantee of higher sales.

However, it takes time to learn and execute the correct tips with proper planning to offer great shopping experience to your buyers. Among the bundle of tips, I have researched the top 8 tips that every online retailer should implement on their eCommerce site for enhancing the conversions and sales through it.

1.Strong and Clear Value Proposition Is Must

Value proposition is the first thing that helps online retailers to decide if people are interested in reading about their product or not. Hence, while designing eCommerce store, it becomes necessary to incorporate a strong value proposition as it will serve as the argument as to why your target audiences should purchase from your store when they have options from your rivals as well.

Most of the online stores lack the knowledge of having clear value proposition on their sites, which creates confusion among their customers to interpret what they are exactly selling to them. Here is an example of petsworld.in, an online pet food and accessories store that has an excellent value proposition on its landing page:

You can see the landing page of petsworld.in has made perfect use of attractive pictures in their value propositions.

What elements are necessary for creating clear value proposition?

• An impressive headline with clear and simple language is importance to grabbing the attention of visitors.
• Display clear buttons or banners for discounts and offers on your online store.
• Use images that could create desire among the customers to purchase them.

2.Display Images in Multiple Angles

Online stores are the places where the customers can’t touch and feel their products, but they can only read the information and check out the images of the product to take their final decision of purchase.

If you are not using high quality images with multiple angles on your product page, you might lose the chance of a successful conversion because images are something that plays a very crucial role in making your ecommerce site attractive and it also help in increasing the sales by motivating the customers.

You can see in the example given below how an online shop has used the multiple angle technique for representing the product in different angles. It will not only help its visitors in checking the look of the product in different angle, but will also incorporate sense of confidence in them that if they purchase this product, they already know how it will look in all angles.

You can also use a 360 degree video of your product that gives the perfect view of your product to your site’s visitors.

3.Create a Trusted Checkout Page to Lessen Shopping Cart Abandonment

Checkout page is undoubtedly one of the most important aspects of an online store that if created excellently ensures decreased shopping cart abandonment rates. You will be surprised to know that 7 out of every 10 online buyers put some products in their shopping cart but leave the site without making the purchase. Why is it so? This is because your online store lacks a trustworthy checkout page, which is essential for generating confidence among your customers that their confidential and financial transactions will be processed securely.

How to create a trusted checkout page?

Use a SSL certificate for your payment page that guarantees customers that their information will be used securely.

Another way to make your checkout pages trustworthy for your customers is to show the trust symbols clearly on your checkout page with a security badge like McAfee, Norton, Verisign, TrustPay etc.

4.Display All the Order Information Clearly

Often people add too many products in their shopping cart and things end up with lots of confusion. The best way to avoid this is to show all the order information clearly to your visitors. The list of information that should be displayed on the checkout page of your online store includes:

• A small image of the product along with its name and specifications
• The price of the product
• The quantity of the product
• A clear up addition of all the charges including the shipping charges for representing the total cost of the order

In the above example, you can show that the customer gets an overall view of his or her order in the form of order summary. It also shows the image of the product along with the quantity of units ordered, price, delivery details and the subtotal.

5.Don’t Forget Responsive Design

It no more a secret that mobile commerce has seen significant splash of growth in recent years and hence, when you are planning to design your ecommerce store, don’t forget to make mobile friendly or responsive. If you will not     make your store responsive, you will lose a great section of your overall site’s visitors including all your mobile target audience. Therefore, pay attention towards responsive design when it comes to creating an online store. A professional ecommerce site should look professional only when it is adjustable to the varied screen sizes of mobile devices. Select the color, background image, font, for your online store by taking care of both your desktop and mobile users.

Seamless mobile experience like the one shown above is the best way of making profit through online stores. If your ecommerce site has all responsiveness integrated in its design, it is definitely going to enhance the conversions on your site.

Concluding Note

Overall, none of the above mentioned tips are very difficult to implement in your ecommerce site. If they are executed effectively, it will not only generate sales, but will also add perfect touch of professional to your online store. Do you have more suggestions for building visually attractive and professional ecommerce store? If so, don’t hesitate to share your thoughts with us in the comment section.

The post Common Ecommerce Design Mistakes That Kill Your Conversions appeared first on Digital Marketing Agency - TIS India Blog.

When you are done with the front end development work, the next thing to do is to make the website live. However experience tells me that the real job of a web developer only starts here. There are many checks and activities which need to be carried out so that the website can function without any glitch. I have listed some tasks that every developer should complete before announcing website to the world:

1.Base URLs

Base URLs are stored in the database table ‘core_config_data’, but it can also be accessed through admin interface if you have access to it: System -> Configuration -> Web. While moving the website, these URLs need to be updated, if not all URLs will be referring back to the staging site. Further, you should not forget the trailing forward slash.

2.Disable Unnecessary Modules

Before launching the website, you should turn off all modules that you are not using. Some of these modules are Mage_Newsletter, Mage_Wishlist, Mage_Rating, Mage_Poll and Mage_Tag.

3.Favicon

It is a minor point that often gets overlooked, but it is highly essential for each and every Magento website. Favicon brands the window or tab in which the website is open in user’s browser. In addition, it is saved with the bookmark so that visitors can easily identify the web pages from your website. Few browsers automatically pick up favicon if you save it in the root directory as favicon.ico. Make sure it is picked up every time; therefore, include following in your head:

<link rel=”icon” type=”image/x-icon” href=”http://media.mediatemple.netdna-cdn.com/favicon.ico” />

4.HTML Head:

You should not leave the original settings in HTML head, and change the title and set the Meta description and keywords, as these are imperative for effective search engine optimization.

System -> Configuration -> General -> Design -> HTML Head

5.Placeholder Images

Placeholder images are shown when any product does not have image of its own. You can create a default set of images for your website and place them in:

catalog/products/placeholder/small_image.jpg, catalog/products/placeholder/image.jpg, and catalog/products/placeholder/thumbnail.jpg

On the other hand, these can be uploaded in admin:
System -> Configuration -> Catalog -> Catalog -> Product Image Placeholders

6.Edit the Default 404 Error Page

Editing the default 404 error page is quite important but it is commonly overlooked. The default web page, in addition to being unattractive, references the Magento store that give your visitors an unnecessary glimpse “behind the curtain” of your web site. Make sure that the design of your 404 page is representative of the voice of your brand and provides a clear message as well as guides your customer back to where they need to be.

7.Contact Information

You should cross check if the store information and email addresses are rightly provided. For this you can go to:
System -> Configuration -> General and System -> Configuration -> Store Email Addresses

8.Titles and Meta Data

The page title is a crucial element for the search engine optimization and is also important so that users know what is on the page. You have to ensure that the page title changes on every page and relates to that content of page.

Meta description and keyword tags are also important for search engine optimization and it is always a good idea to include them. You should change the description on each web page so as to make it relate to the content of that page, because often Google displays it in its search result description.

9.Transactional Emails

The transactional email uses a different logo to the default one. You should make sure that the desired images are saved in theme directory as logo_email.gif.

10.Transaction Email Template

As far as transactional emails are concerned, Magento makes great use of the templates. After getting into the admin panel, you need to load the default templates. In addition, you can modify these templates when required and then save custom Magento template you have arrived at.

11.Payment Methods

Payment methods are the important part of any online business and any loophole given here can spoil the entire setup. There is plethora of options for the secure payment, but you should choose the trusted ones like Authorize.net or PayPal which come in as default in Magento.

12.Speed Check

In this broadband age, website loading speed should definitely be the main priority. You should also check your website for the speed. There are many tools available which are useful for this purpose. These tools will identify the weak points and also suggest improvements to enhance the speed of your website. There is a chance that when your website is slow, your visitor may just skip and jump to your competitors’ website.

13.Database Backup

It is essential to have a proper data backup on regular basis and you should also know how you could restore your data when the situation demands to do so. The data restoration strategy should be in place so as to avoid any emergency.

14.Log Cleaning

Magento has a feature where it keeps all the logs in its database, but over a period of time it may get bloated too. It is easy to clean up these logs regularly with an option that is available in the admin. This option is available here:

System -> Configuration -> Advanced -> System -> Log Cleaning
This option is disabled by default and therefore has to be enabled. Daily cleaning of logs will help greatly.

15.Analytics

Installing some analytics tools is quite important for measuring the statistics to see your site performance and conversion rates. You should track monthly page views, daily unique hits and browser statistics, and all other useful data on regular basis. Google Analytics is a favorite among website owners and it free too. Some others good analytics are Kissmetrics, Clicky, Mint and StatCounter.

16.Some Other Important Checklists:

There are some other tasks that you should finish before launching your website. These tasks are as follows:

• Caching– you should re-enable the cache once you have finished development.
• Google sitemap-it is very important for SEO point of view. Go to Catalog -> Google Sitemap
• Maintenance.flag- It is used to display a holding page while doing maintenance or going live. For this go to System -> Configuration -> General -> Maintenance Mode
• Index management- Make sure that you have re-indexed after making all changes in the catalogue.

I have mentioned all the important tasks that are necessary to be completed before launching the website. If you know of any other activities, which you think are important, you can share them with us in the comment section.

The post Magento Website Pre-Launch Checklist – 15 Important Points Discussed appeared first on Digital Marketing Agency - TIS India Blog.

MagentoGo is already discontinued and if you are among those website owners who are still on the Magento Go platform or looking to migrate to some other platforms, there are various good alternatives available, but the choice completely depends on your own set of requirements and preferences.

However, before moving on with the migration of the Magento Go website to other better alternatives, it is necessary to evaluate the drawbacks that have caused its failure among its clients.

Drawbacks That Forced Shut Down of Magento Go Platform

Instead of being an open-source platform with a well-supported framework, Magento Go websites require a dedicated and skilled team of professionals to create and maintain them. Hence, it becomes a necessity for the Magento Go website owners to hire good and experienced Magento development company with well-equipped manpower to build and maintain their website, which ultimately leads to more investment and budget.

Although this was a free framework to be used by small business owners, the Magento Go framework necessitates monthly fees to be paid by the store owners once, they have a good product line or they need more bandwidth for their online store.

Now, when once popular Magento Go comes to its expiry, it becomes important for the website owners to migrate their online store to some better alternatives without affecting the pace and productivity of their businesses. For this, I have selected some alternatives that you can easily select to migrate your Magento Go store and these are:

• Shopify
• Bigcommerce
• Prestashop
• Woocommerce
• Zencart
• Ubercart
• Opencart
• VirtuaMart
• OSCommerce

1.Shopify

Shopify is a one-in-all eCommerce online shopping cart solution for those online store owners who are thinking to migrate their store from Magento Go. It includes everything that online retailers require to sell their products online.

Benefits of choosing Shopify as an alternative:

• It allows categorization of products based on their collections.
• It comes with an advanced Content Management System that helps you to check your website’s visitors, sales, referrals, and traffic sources.
• It comes with a rich text editor that you can use for developing impressive product descriptions.
• It is blessed with a rich app store for adding more functionality to your online store.

2.Bigcommerce

If you are having a startup business and planning to switch your online store from Magento Go to a more affordable and best feature online shopping cart solution, Bigcommerce is there for you. Being a hosted solution, Bigcommerce helps you in saving your investments required to keep a development team for introducing changes to your online store and it is blessed with regularly updated and new features to make your website more customizable and personalized as per your preferences.

Benefits of Bigcommerce as an alternative:

• It comes with nearly 1000 templates to choose from that are all easily customizable to fit the merchandising requirements.
• Comes with fly-out and standard category menus
• Integrated with smart search box along with “did you mean” functionality
• Supports multiple currencies, taxes, and languages

3.Prestashop

When you have decided to migrate your online store from Magento Go platform to Prestashop, you can do so by registering your account at Cart2Cart with your Google or Facebook Account

However, the main question is why to choose Cart2Cart to migrate your Magento Go store to Prestashop? This is because there are no specific technical skills required for performing the complete migration of your website and the security and data transfer accuracy is also guaranteed.

Benefits of choosing Prestashop as an alternative:

• Comes with free shopping cart
• Integrated with a vast range of product management tools
• Advanced SEO and marketing tools
• Various payment and shipping gateways

4.Woocommerce

Woocommerce, a free WordPress plugin is very useful for the businesses, which are planning to switch their online store from Magento Go. This WordPress plugin makes selling the products online very easy and it’s a good option for the first-timers since it does not require tough technical expertise to operate your online store.

Benefits of Woocommerce as an alternative:

• Besides being free, it is very easy to install and operate.
• It offers a very professional and attractive look to the online stores.
• It offers enhanced security to the online store owners since it continues to update on a regular basis thus eliminating then chances of security issues.
• It offers greater flexibility to the website owners to add and sell their products.

5.Zencart

Being a free, versatile and strong online shopping cart software, Zencart is treated as one of the ideal alternatives for the Magento Go store owners to migrate their online shopping stores. Apart from offering personalized customization facility to the website owners, Zencart can do automated tasks and it allows easy navigation of the products and categories.

Benefits of Zencart as an alternative to Magento Go:

• It offers various currencies, taxes, and even languages. It offers different options for shipping and payment to the customers and website owners.
• It allows the search engine optimizations with the use of Meta tags and keywords, which could also be optimized as per each product and categories.
• It allows the shopping cart to act as the main page of your website.

4.Opencart

An open-source shopping platform, Opencart offers a good choice over Magento Go for migrating your online store owing to the wide range of plugins available for this platform and it also comes with easy customization facility that makes the migration much more convenient and effortless.

The migration from Magento Go to Opencart can be done using Cart2Cart service, which provides automated shopping cart migration without any worry for data inconsistency or redundancy

Benefits of Opencart as an alternative:

• Large number of plugins availability makes Opencart a good choice over other platforms.
• Has a good technical support community along with discussion boards for answering the queries of its customers.
• It comes with vast in-built functionalities like Magento and Prestashop that offers the website owners an opportunity to make their website migration adjustable as per their requirements.
• Comes with easy and clear administration panel offering the first-timers a better choice to opt for.

6.Ubercart

Considered as Drupal’s ecommerce shopping cart solution, Ubercart is perfect alternative over Magento Go due to its incredible efficiency and usefulness and is regularly updated with a skilled technical support community. This ecommerce shopping cart solution allows the users to use the Drupal’s core code, which is a complete package of great capabilities and performance. The website owners have the choice to customize the features of Ubercart as per their choice to give their websites more personalized feel and touch.

Benefits of using Ubercart as an alternative:

• Easily compatible with Drupal
• Product catalogues can easily get customized
• Provides flexibility and versatility in its code
• Comes with payment system integration
• Users can easily pay and checkout at single page
• Filling the cart and maintaining the orders is easy

8.VirtueMart

VirtueMart is another better alternative for migrating your online store from Magento Go since, this could also be achieved by using the services of Cart2Cart that offers automated, quick, and appropriate transfer of Magento Go website to VirtueMart. By using Cart2Cart for migration, you are saved from worries of losing your important data, redundancy or any other potential errors that occur while the migration tool place from one store to another.

Benefits of choosing VirtueMart as an alternative:

• Highly advanced and most popular eCommerce software in Joomla
• It is ideal for carrying all important and basic online store applications
• It comes with the facility of managing the products, and user lists with greater ease within Joomla
• This could be easily integrated with the Joomla Content Management System for offering safe online shopping environment.
• It offers host of features and the functionality can be extended using several plugins, templates, and modules.

9.OSCommerce

Rewarded as one of the most popular and comprehensive open source ecommerce solution, OScommerce is considered as a good alternative over Magento Go due to its immense list of features and it also one of the most versatile shopping cart solution that provides immense customization choices for the store owners depending on their needs

Benefits of choosing OSCommerce as an alternative:

• Comes with full features and options for customization
• Supports vast range of shipping services and credit card processors
• Handle vast amount of database with indexing feature
• Immense number of add-on modules available

If you are going to be an ex-client of Magento Go, you absolutely need not to worry, since the alternatives discussed above are good choices to migrate your store and our skilled team of ecommerce developers are there to assist you in this crucial process of your branding and business. However, if you have any other platforms in your mind that you are planning to switch your site, do share with us in the comment section.

10. Wix

Wix is one of the dependable e-commerce platforms you can consider if you are looking for an alternative to migrate to from Magento Go. With robust yet easy-to-use features, Wix allows you to create, manage and promote your e-commerce website with ease.

Also, you will get numerous templates to choose from and customize. Due to the availability of drag-and-drop features, you can easily build your e-commerce website even without any technical know-how.

With Wix, you can showcase your products in stunning galleries, with the flexibility for you to modify product options, add images and alter descriptions. Moreover, Wix is mobile-optimized, enabling your customers to access your online store on any device, anytime and anywhere.

Benefits of Wix as an Alternative

• Allows you to set the tax as well as shipping rules about the customer’s location
• Provides a store manager panel for tracking of inventories and orders
• Highlights products with limited stocks or discounted prices with ribbons
• Allows displaying unlimited products and adding up to 15 images per product

The post 10 Magento Go Alternatives for Your E-commerce Store appeared first on Digital Marketing Agency - TIS India Blog.

As per industry facts, there are more than 1, 50,000 Magento stores across the globe and this trendy ecommerce platform is being used by start-ups to well establish brands like Samsung. With its rich features, Magento has become the preferred ecommerce solution for majority of online store owners, however for a successful and feature-rich eCommerce application, the default community version of Magento should be updated with popular add-ons.

After researching many successful ecommerce sites and analyzing the effects of the popular extensions on the performance of an ecommerce store, I have selected few extensions which are must for any Magento shop.

Top 10 Incredible Magento Extensions

1. Smart Checkout

Users never prefer long checkout processes. Nowadays, the online stores are being browsed a lot on mobile phones and users prefer smarter checkout process for easy checkout. The new Smart Checkout extension helps in overcoming the complex steps of order and payment procedure that could lead your customers leave your store without checking out properly.

2. Social Network Integration Bundle

Social media cannot be ignored for a while when we are talking about enhancing the performance of Magento Store for better revenue. The social media channels help in driving considerable traffic to your ecommerce website. Therefore, the Social Network Integration Bundle extension is built for allowing convenient and faster integration of social media icons on your online store. With the help of these icons, the visitors can easily share the content over your website in their circles, which ultimately helps in pouring more visitors to your site.

You can easily select which social media icons to include on your online store with the help of this Social Network Integration Bundle extension. You can also integrate the social buttons depending on the features of the social media sites such as connect, like, tweet, share, comment and follow.

3. Bronto

If targeted marketing campaigns are considered as successful ways of driving traffic to an online store, then the Magento stores can use Bronto extension, which helps the Magento store owners in driving significant traffic to their online store via targeted marketing campaigns. You can easily bring in the past purchase data consisting of the product details and complete order history with the help of this extension that can be used for creating effective lifecycle marketing campaigns for converting the first time buyers into your loyal customers.

4.Canonical URL’s for Magento

This free extension of Magento not only integrates “rel” canonical URL to the head of your web pages but it also let you set the custom canonical links for all your products.

Moreover, this extension also assists the search engines to find the relevant web pages of your ecommerce store against specific search queries performed by your target audience. In general, this extension helps in improving the search engine ranks of your Magento store, which is necessary for driving traffic to your website.

5. XML Map Creator

Another vital Magento extension that helps in improving the overall performance and sales of your Magento store is XML Map creator, which allows convenient establishment and development of various XML sitemaps for your ecommerce site. Besides being simple to use, you can use this extension for submitting the newly created pages of your Magento store in the sitemap submission areas of Google and Bing webmasters.

Submitting the pages will allow these webmasters to analyze your website in depth and also to crawl it better, which will potentially improve the amount of web pages indexed in the search engines thus increasing the chances of better traffic on your site.

6.Fooman Google Analytics

As it name suggest, this extension offers profound abilities of Google Analytics to the Magento store owners

With this, you can easily keep a track of the conversions and Adwords purchases on your site. You can also evaluate how the Adwords are generating conversions on your website. Moreover, it can also track each page of your ecommerce site, which includes the sections reclaimed through AJAX in one-page-checkout.

7. Google Shopping API

Google Shopping API allows the developers or the back end operators to upload and manage the products and important cataloge information conveniently on the Magento store.

Thus, it helps in enhancing the visibility of your catalogue information and products and it also ensures that your online store can perform better on search engines by helping developers to define the products, which will be sent to Google.

8.Trashcan for Magento

It is very common to delete products by mistake while handling your Magento store. With thousands of products to manage, it becomes sometimes hectic to concentrate on each product while uploading details and hence, often the product gets deleted from your store by fault. The Trashcan extension is meant to solve these types of problems only. It does exactly what you expect when you delete some important product from the backend of your website unknowingly.

This extension acts as a life saver when you have not sufficient time for reloading the deleted products because this extension works similar to recycle bin on our desktop and laptops. It puts the deleted product in the recycle bin and you can easily store the product from there whenever it is required. This Magento extension keeps all the deleted products in the admin interface giving you the liberty of restoring the product as per your need.

9.Blog Magento Extension by aheadWorks

The importance of blog in driving leads and sales to your Ecommerce store is worth to mention. Blogs are best way of improving user engagement on your online store, which is ultimately important for converting leads into sales.

This extension can be used as a great way to connect and communicate with your customers and this Magento connect extension makes it convenient for you to integrate a blog on your online store. You can also integrate your old blog with the latest one with the help of this extension.

10.Follow up Emails

For online store owners, sending follow up emails play an important role in improving the overall traffic on their website. It is necessary to keep in touch with your existing customers. The Follow up Emails extension by aheadWorks is a powerful auto-responser Magento add-on that allows you to reach your existing customers or target audience by sending them follow emails related to your products and orders.

This extension also helps in maintaining long term relationship with the existing and past customers and it can easily be added on your Magento store.

These are the ten incredible extensions that I have chosen depending on their usefulness to the merchants as well to the customers. However, if you have any more lifesaving Magento extensions that can help in augmenting the overall performance and sales of a Magento store, do share with us through your comments.

The post Top 10 Incredible Magento Extensions For Your Online Store appeared first on Digital Marketing Agency - TIS India Blog.

Ecommerce being the only trillion dollar industry growing at a double-digit percentage each year, there are more than 2,00,000 online stores actively running on Magento alone – one of the biggest ecommerce platforms across the globe with 26% marketshare.  But online retailers are facing tough competition to survive in this highly competitive market despite choosing a platform that offers best-in-class functionality & features. Very often, while consulting online merchants for Magento ecommerce solutions, both Magento Community & Magento enterprise, clients ask me – “Why we’re not selling? How can we convert visitors into buyers? Are we missing something?”.

So, in this blog, I decided to share some important conversion tips you shouldn’t miss in your checklist while launching & optimizing a Magento online store. Not just the tips, wherever possible I have also included the – How to do this section to let you know how you can execute a particular task

1.Launch a mobile-first online shop : Go responsive & offer a painless user experience

Mobile devices now account for nearly 50.3% of all ecommerce traffic and mobile commerce is now the default way that people shop online. Still, I come across so many Magento stores that look horrible on my smartphone. Adopting a multi device approach by using a responsive design is not only recommended by Google itself but also ensures easier upgradability & allows you to use only one digital strategy for everything – may it be marketing campaigns, optimization of keywords or URLs. As an example of a responsive design, you can checkout one of our client sites – Petsworld  that we did in Magento Ecommerce. Also, focus on giving best user experience to your mobile customers by customizing the layout of your store & the size of your “Buy”, “Add to Cart” etc buttons according to a minimal size that visitors can easily click with their fingers & thumbs.

How to go responsive – To convert your existing Magento shop into a mobile ready shop, you can use extensions like Couchcommerce and Tenfoot or if starting from scratch, you can use a good responsive theme like Argento or Magento Mobile HTML 5 Themes but don’t forget to customize it. 

2.Use a professionally designed Custentoom Magento Theme Design instead of Free Magento Themes

Each online store is unique, sells different type of products and targets different customer’s demography. Hence, from marketing perspective, a custom Magento design converts better than a free Magento theme. Here are my 4 solid points that should give you enough reason not to go for a free theme design

Brand Image: A potential buyer might have seen that design before sported by any other brand because free & even premium themes are used by numerous online stores. This will give your visitors an immediate red flag not to buy from you as they’ll doubt your authenticity and may hesitate sharing their credit card information with you. This is why, I always advise my clients to hire dedicated ecommerce magento developers and get a custom theme design that can represent their corporate identity and build a unique brand image with their target audience so that buyers remember them and keep coming back.

Technical support – Free Themes don’t provide any technical support. If something goes wrong, you can’t count on anybody for help. Choosing a reliable Magento ecommerce company to create a custom theme for your store will help you to fix any potential problems in future.

Upgrades – Magento is an ever evolving ecommerce platform that constantly upgrades a no. of times and incorporates new features. Free themes might start showing errors or you may not be able to take advantage of cool new features that roll out in future. This is why when my Magento ecommerce development team designs a custom theme; we always focus on integrating themes that are easily upgradable.

Functionality – You might want some unique features or additional functions in your store which is not possible to achieve with a free theme. Whatever theme you may pick up- Free or premium, you would require professional Magento development services from an experienced Magento ecommerce development company to support you in making the best online store and provide solutions to your problems.

3. Customize the Shopping Cart Page for more conversions

When a customer arrives at the shopping cart page, you already win half the battle. All you need is to prompt your visitors to click on the “proceed to checkout” button as soon as possible and make the transaction. By default, Magento theme uses a design that is not at all optimized for conversions. As I already told you in the above point to get a custom theme, also ensure you optimize the shopping cart page for more conversions. Change the size and color of the “Proceed to checkout” button on the shopping cart page, change the layout to one that pleases customers to shop and incorporate more effective call to actions like “Go to checkout” .By doing all these things, you can almost fetch double the amount of sales in your online store.

4.Use One Page Checkout Booster instead of the Default Magento Checkout

Research shows that upto 15% shoppers abandon their shopping cart for each page they’re required to fill in while checkout. The default Magento Checkout Page ruins all the online shopping experience of customers with its lengthy checkout process. If most of your customers are abandoning shopping carts without finishing orders, then there are high chances that you’re losing sales because of a complicated and long checkout process. To avoid this, you need to simplify the checkout and reduce it to minimal steps for faster order processing. Also, pay attention to all the segments of your checkout page from layout to content and navigation to usability.

How to do this – Make sure to get the Magento extension One Step Checkout Booster installed when you’re creating your online store or rather I would suggest you to go for a completely customized online store from a professional Magento ecommerce development company who will do everything for you. Here I have shared a screenshot of One page checkout booster below that quickly does everything in one go.

Bonus Tips

• Use a persistent shopping cart
• Make sure that the user doesn’t need to enter the same information twice in checkout process
•  Preserve customer information if a validation error occurs so that users don’t have to enter the whole information again and get frustrated
• Try to reduce the required (*) fields as much as possible.
• Label all the fields & if possible, write example information in the needed fields
• Don’t forget to offer a guest checkout

5.Selling internationally?? Localize your Magento shop to specific countries

If you’re selling your products globally, then it is very important to make your customers understand that you offer international shipping also. To do this, you can simply use an IP identification method and then redirect your customers to a Magento storeview in their language, say for E.g. A customer with a US IP goes to www.your-magento-store.com/us

6.Optimize the Magento Product Page and even the Product Search

It is extremely important to optimize the product pages and the product search for better conversions. After optimizing, don’t forget to check the accuracy as well by trying it out yourself.

How to optimize your product search – When users search for same products in singular or plural – like dog foods or dogs food or dogs foods, the search result should be same. If your correct product is not showing up in search result, you should add product tags in your online store by using

Magento backend –>Catalog -> Tags-> Add a new Tag and then fill the search tags and place it to the required product.

How to optimize your Product Pages for higher responses – Use only high quality product images so that customers can easily get a clear idea about your product. Make sure your default image i.e the base image should be of highest quality. Also try to show more than one image in different angles below it, design a nice background and if possible, use product videos for best selling products. Don’t forget to write a good product description that people can easily understand and make the content SEO friendly.

7.Don’t let customers wait. Avoid Performance bottlenecks & optimize for speed

Waiting is the worst thing that a customer wants to do in online shopping. Don’t kill the shopping experience of your customers. Optimizing for high performance not only ensures a better SEO but it helps in gaining an edge above your competitors. Every page should be as fast as possible, especially the checkout if you want your customers to buy from you. If you don’t know how to do this, read below or to know about this in detail, go through one of my previous blogs on Tips to enhance the speed and security of a Magento website.

• Use minimum amount of JavaScript code lines & clean up your CSS by removing the unnecessary rules. This will speed up the page &      reduce load time. If possible, you can combine your JS & CSS codes in one file
• Optimize all the images. To do this, you can combine images into CSS Sprites – Clustering a bunch of images in a sprite can reduce the page load time by a great extent. To do this you can use the tool Spriteme

8.Work on your USP’s (Unique Selling Points)

Strategies some unique selling points that cut through the mental barriers a buyer goes through while shopping & make way for higher conversions. For example – offering Easy Returns, Free Shipping, and Price Guarantee, Risk Free Shopping or the count of Facebook can be great USPs.

Bonus Tip

Show your Facebook Likes or Twitter followers count and Product reviews so that visitors can take the buying decision instantly

The Final Note

Whatsoever may be your ecommerce business model; the bottom line is closing sales and fetching more revenue for greater ROI. Hence, creating a beautiful online store & launching it on the web isn’t just enough. Optimizing your Magento ecommerce shop to achieve optimal sales also becomes an extremely important aspect to consider if you’re truly focused on growth. I hope you’ve enjoyed the blog and will start implementing these tips as soon as possible for better sales. Please throw in comments below if you also have a good tip to share with us.

The post Tips to Increase Your Magento Online Store’s Conversions & Sales appeared first on Digital Marketing Agency - TIS India Blog.

The move of eBay to shut down Magento Go and ProStores on February 1, 2015 is out of the blue for more than 10,000 small and mid-size merchants. If these customers want to continue a hosted service, then Bigcommerce and Shopify are the best hosted platform to count on. After hours of research work on both Shopify and Bigcommerce, I have collected following important information which helps you to choose the right platform to support your ecommerce business as per you need and budget:

General Information:

Features Comparison:

The best e-commerce platform should have the store features that are needed, while being pocket friendly. The table below shows clear comparison between Bigcommerce and Shopify.

Following features are some of the most important considerations when we evaluate a hosted e-commerce platform:

• 1.  Pricing

While choosing a hosted e-commerce platform, price is an essential factor to consider for most of us. Bigcommerce offers 3 pricing plans, whereas Shopify offers 4 (plus a custom plan; more on that below). They both offer free trials, although Shopify offers one twice as long as Bigcommerce.

Starter plan of Shopify is only $15, which is cheaper as compare to the Bigcommerce’s $29.95 starter (‘silver’) plan. But, the starter plan of Shopify restricts the number of products you can sell to 15 (versus an unlimited number with Bigcommerce) and limits your ability to edit your shop’s theme via HTML and CSS.

A fairer comparison is between ‘basic’ plan of Shopify, which costs $29 per month, and ‘silver’ plan of Bigcommerce. Both offer unlimited products, with Shopify winning in terms of cost which is $0.95 cheaper per month. As you move up the scale with Bigcommerce and Shopify plans, you get increased functionality (more products, more features, more storage, etc.), all of which come at an increased cost.

One aspect of Shopify’s approach to pricing is that they allow the customers to build a custom plan based on their needs and requirements. That means you can incorporate some features from more expensive plans into lower cost plan without shelling out for more expensive one.

Winner

In terms of pricing, Shopify comes out ahead if you only need to sell a few products and you want to create a customized pricing plan. Bigcommerce is a good in terms of their off the shelf packages as they come with more features, and if you are taking their $79.95 ‘gold’ plan, you don’t have to worry about the transaction fees.

• 2. Themes and Designs

Having a professional, good looking and inviting storefront is the first step to welcoming and enticing your prospective customers which can increase your chances of making a sale.

Shopify’s themes are very impressive and updated and these look professional. Shopify uses independent and professional designers to create these beautiful themes, so the designs are always fresh and modern and they can make your store look welcoming and credible. Some themes of Shopify are free, whereas some are paid and if you want to use their premium theme, the cost will range from $80 to $180.  At first, this may sound pricey but it is a worthy investment that will make your store look good. These beautiful themes can help your website visitors to stay longer in your e-store to browse around, which will improve chances of making sales.

Bigcommerce offers over 100 themes and all of them are free, but themes previews are not available, unless you give them your email and sign up for their 15-day trial. In addition to this, themes of Bigcommerce are pretty outdated. The themes of Bigcommerce were functional, and they will work fine for e-store builders, but you will not get that “wow” factor like Shopify’s themes. However, in March 2014, Bigcommerce updated their theme collection and included 28 new themes which are all mobile friendly. These themes are free as well as paid that will range from $120 – $250, but most are in the $120 – $140 range.

Winner:

Elegant web-design and superior looks matter a-lot, if you are trying to generate more sales to grow your online business. In my view, Shopify wins the “Battle of the Themes” as they provide better and a much wider variety of professional online store themes to you.      

• 3. Ease-of-use

Both Bigcommerce and Shopify offer easy to use admins, and their interfaces are user-friendly. When it comes to the initial store set-up process, Bigcommerce is a bit easier to use than Shopify. Whereas, Shopify is the easiest shopping cart to install, setup, and launch your e- store. It stresses the importance of simplicity and the ‘beauty’, and has a ‘clean’ user interface with no ‘unnecessary’ tool and easy-to-understand instructions for everything.

Winner

In a nutshell, when it comes to ‘ease-of-use’, I highly recommend Shopify as a winner. Everyone, from professional web developer to beginner user, can benefit from the convenience and great help that Shopify offers. Like Bigcommerce, Shopify also gives you freedom to personalize your store with coding.

• 4. Ecommerce Tools
  

Ecommerce tools, like ability to manage inventory, set prices, showcase products, taxes, configure shipping details, tracking orders, setting up payment gateways, and many more, are fundamentals of a good e-commerce builder. Both Shopify and Bigcommerce provide really awesome tools so that you can build and grow your online store. But, there is a slight difference in how they approach this.

Shopify provides you with all the basic tools in order to create and operate an online store. Advanced tools, like product reviews, product recommendations, customer wish list, etc. are only available in their App store where you have to pay for them; however, they all have a free trial period for you to test them out. Shopify also offers you their own payment gateway so that you can manage all your money in their dashboard that will save you time. If you choose this option of Shopify, they will also waive all your transaction fees.

On the other side, Bigcommerce gives you the most comprehensive set of tools amongst all leading e-commerce builders.  It has a lot more advanced tools which are “out of the box”, therefore, these are included in the monthly fee.

Bigcommerce and Shopify also give you all the marketing and SEO tools that you need to run a good e-store. From a Facebook store to coupons, these platforms have ways of promoting your store. However, Bigcommerce goes an extra mile and automatically creates feeds to popular comparison shopping sites like Shopzilla, Google Shopping, and BizRate.

Winner

While both the hosted platforms provide you with the fundamental tools you need to run a good e-store, but Bigcommerce offers you a bit more advanced tools in their monthly packages. Therefore, the winner is Bigcommerce.

• 5. Customer Service and Technical Support

Both hosted platforms maintain plethora of online support. Bigcommerce has published more than 500 topical articles, operates a helpful forum, and maintains a knowledgebase, as well as Facebook and Twitter pages. Shopify’s support is also impressive, including a manual, live chat, forum, and Ecommerce University. This cart also maintains active Twitter and Facebook accounts.

With Shopify, you will be able to get in touch with their tech support team over the phone 24/7. On the other side, Bigcommerce offers 24/7 support during the week via email and chat, but not overnight on Saturday and Sunday. In Bigcommerce, if you really want to call someone, you can always call a phone support number which is not toll-free from the country you are based in.

Winner

Shopify is the winner in the customer care bracket.

The Good and Bad of Bigcommerce and Shopify 

Bigcommerce:-

The Good:

• Unlimited bandwidth is offered with each and every one of their plans.
• Abandoned Cart Saver feature is available on their Gold, Platinum, and Diamond plans. This tool converts lost customers into sales by notifying customers of their uncompleted orders and abandoned carts.
• Marketing and SEO tools allow you to dominate search engines.
• Integrated newsletters, coupon codes, and social sharing are quite simple.
• This mobile friendly platform enables customers to shop using their mobile devices.
• In 2013, it brought a new look to their admin dashboard and their new look has simple navigation and a neat design.

The Bad

• If you want to edit the look and feel of Bigcommerce templates, CSS and HTML experience is strongly recommended.
• There is a 2% transaction fee for all members on their Silver plan, whereas other plans do not charge any transaction fees.

Shopify:-

The Good

• Plans start as low as $14 per month for 25 products, as well as you will get unlimited bandwidth, and 1 GB of storage.
• It offers unlimited bandwidth on all of its plans, including its cheapest plan.
• Due to its simple design editor, it allows you to customize the layout of your online store. It requires no experience in CSS and HTML.
• It has convenient and simple store launch wizard tool that sets up an online store within minutes.
• Abandoned Cart Recovery, which is same as the abandoned cart saver of Bigcommerce, is available on professional and unlimited plans.
• Their sophisticated SEO tools will rank your store high on major search engines, but some marketing tools are limited on smaller plans.
• All themes and the actual checkout pages are integrated to work on mobile device.

The Bad

• Their transaction fees range from 0 to 2%, but it can be waived by using their credit card processing service.
• It limits theme editing and some marketing tools on their smaller plans. Their $14 per month plan does not allow you to use advanced reporting and coupons. 

Other options for Magento Go and ProStores customers

If Magento Go and ProStores customers don’t want to continue with hosted solution, then other option for these customers is to switch to Magento Community Edition and hire experienced Magento developers because:

• Magento CE is free to download and use
• Most features are the same
• Access to Magento Connect with thousands of extensions
• Porting to Magento CE would not be expensive, as customers already have the design and they will not pay for a full rebuild of their site.

Conclusion

Choosing the right e-commerce builder for your business is not a straight forward decision. You have to consider so many things, and our review is helpful in steering you towards some of the key factors to evaluate. Ultimately, it’s a case of weighing up your requirements and plumping for the system that suits your requirements best. You can also sign up for Shopify’s 14-day trial and Bigcommerce’s free 15-day trial to decide which shopping cart is the best fit for your online store.

The post Bigcommerce or Shopify: What is the Best Option for Magentogo Store Owners? appeared first on Digital Marketing Agency - TIS India Blog.

The two eCommerce platforms – Magento Go & ProStores, owned by the largest retail division eBay Inc, are going to shut down the online shops of more than 10,000 online merchants on Feb 1, 2015. Both the platforms catered to small & mid-sized businesses across the globe providing software-as-a-service, precisely a hosted eCommerce solution. eBay has selected Bigcommerce – the fastest growing Sydney based eCommerce enterprise as the transition SAAS provider to migrate all the affected online merchants.

Mark Lavelle, eBay Enterprise head of product & strategy, said in a conversation – “Magento is dedicated to helping fast-growing retailers succeed. We chose Bigcommerce to help with the transition because of their shared commitment to client success & their proven track record of migrating large groups of merchants onto their platform.”

How big is the acquisition deal for Bigcommerce ??

Bigcommerce already counts more than 50,000 online retailers in 25 industries across 100 countries & the total sales of all merchandise sold on eCommerce stores is about to touch $4 billion approximately.

In a news posted on Wall Street Journal nearly 15 days ago, it was revealed that Bigcommerce signed an agreement with Global Payments Inc, one of the largest worldwide providers of payment solutions, to grow its business by leaps & bounds. In view of this, the partnership deal put forward by eBay to acquire nearly 10,000+customers of Magento Go & ProStores is like icing on the cake for Bigcommerce – a golden opportunity to expand its customer base fast.

In an interview, Eddie Machalani, CEO of Big commerce said – “We are prepared & excited to work with ProStores & Magento Go merchants to help them continue their success using the Big commerce platform. We understand that the to-do list for small business owners is never ending, and our teams are standing by to deliver the very best migration & on boarding experience so merchants can focus on growing their businesses.”

What eBay is doing to ensure smooth migration of its clients from Magento Go & Prostores to Bigcommerce or other new platforms ??

To ensure customers can plan the transition before Feb 2015 (~7 months), eBay is making efforts to help its clients decide what to do next & migrate their stores without any hassle. Here are the offerings the company plans to provide as of now.

1. Customers of both the platforms who plan to stay with the hosted ecommerce solutions can choose to migrate to Bigcommerce subscription-based SAAS plans that are similar to what they used to avail earlier from Magento Go or Prostores.
   The transition will be free for all the customers who plan to go with Bigcommerce. Plus, they can take advantage of the checklists, planning resources & special offers updated on Magento Go Migration center & Prostores Migration center respectively, before taking transition to any new ecommerce solution.
2. For those merchants who are looking forward to self-hosted eCommerce solutions & consider themselves the right fit for Magento EE or CE editions, they can upgrade to these more flexible platforms & can take advantage of the migration support and migration tools on Magento ecommerce extension library. Alternatively, you can also hire Magento ecommerce development company offering customization & migration services at an affordable cost.

What Bigcommerce has in box for Magento Go & Prostores customers ??

1. Securely hosted eCommerce tools with 100+ features included right from the start
Bigcommerce gives you a fully packaged eCommerce solution for inventory management, order management & purchasing management with nearly 10 hosted eCommerce tools that includes a mobile-optimized website, a domain name for your online store, a CMS with WYSIWYG editor, a built-in blog, fully-featured shopping cart, product catalog; secure payment gateway& multiple email accounts.

2.Built-in SEO & Exclusive Marketing Tools

With discount options & coupon codes, social media integration facility, newsletters for email marketing, automatically generated customer lists & tens of exclusive features like abandoned cart saver etc; Bigcommerce gives you more marketing tools than anyone else can.

3.Best in-house support

Bigcommerce has a dedicated support team that can help you with everything –from setting up your store to importing products & fixing other bugs, inventory issues or payment transactions. With 500+ support articles, detailer tutorials, webinars from experts & an online community of hundreds of store owners; they’ve got you covered.

How to plan successful migration for your online shop ??

As a consequence of the sudden shutdown, we’ve got more than 100 migration requests from Magento Go & Prostores clients asking to suggest a better solution, recommend a successful plan& transit their store as soon as possible. Our Magento ecommerce development team of more than 20+certified professionals have already migrated more than 50 stores successfully without affecting the inventory & sales. When one of our clients asked to share the strategy we’re using for data migration & design migration, I along with my team of ecommerce development experts decided to sum it up as follows and also share some tips to help other online businesses.

Step 1 –Analyze your current e-shop & decide whether you would like to go for self-hosted solutions (licensed & open source) or fully-hosted ecommerce solutions (SAAS)

What we recommend–If you’re planning to add more & more customers and invest big in your current venture to turn it into a million dollar business in near future, you can go for the free Magento Community Edition (open-source) or the paid Magento Enterprise edition. For this solution, you will require expert services & you may need to hire dedicated Magento developers to make your online business a huge success. But if you are a small-sized online retail business, it will be a smart move to stick to the hosted solutions & go for Bigcommerce. If Bigcommerce doesn’t seem a good fit, you can plan for another popular ecommerce solution – Shopify.

Step 2– Choose an external vendor for successful migration

What we recommend – Be careful while deciding the vendor to avail migration services for your online shop.Hand over the work only to an ecommerce development company who has prior experience of migrating shopping carts successfully& is ready to provide best post-delivery support. If you’re unsure of any such company providing expert services along with 24 X 7 support, you can contact us & our technical team will assist you.

Step 3–Ask your vendor to test everything before going live with the new store & don’t forget to run a mini-check yourself too.

What we recommend – Once everything’s up, make sure your vendor carries out a complete check before launching it. After this, you can yourself run a couple of mini-checks to see whether your store is running successfully. This can be done by inviting some friends, family or loyal customers to shop from the store & send you the feedback.

The Final Note

Ecommerce platform Migration is not a cakewalk. Besides your hundreds of dollars, your hard-earned customer reputation is at risk. Make sure you go through wisely & as painlessly as possible.

The post Bigcommerce Takes Over as Magento Go & Prostores Shut Down appeared first on Digital Marketing Agency - TIS India Blog.

If you’re one amongst those businesses whose online stores thrive on eBay’s Magento Go hosted ecommerce solution & ProStores, then this news might come to you like a bolt from the blue – EBay’s senior vice president Mark Lavelle has officially confirmed the shutdown of Magento Go on Feb 1, 2015, at the Magento Go website in an open letter to all merchants. Two days earlier i.e. on July 1, 2014; Magento marketing head Craig Peasley announced on its official blog that they will be transitioning their Magento Go & ProStores merchants off and will finally stop providing customers support for these two products on February 1, 2015.

Magento’s range of solutions powers businesses of all sizes while giving the power, flexibility & features to serve hundreds of eCommerce clients across the globe. Both its hosted eCommerce packages – Pro store & Magento Go helped many small & medium-sized businesses sell their products & services online.

Moreover, these platforms allowed users to create a customizable virtual storefront using their own IP by providing a complete eCommerce solution that included domain registration, hosting & a shopping cart along with secure payment processing as well.

Why EBay took the tough decision?

According to multiple resources, it was confirmed that Magento Go never succeeded in pulling customers against other eCommerce giants – Big commerce & Shopify who were its biggest competitors in the eCommerce marketplace and succeeded in targeting more sophisticated online sellers across the globe than Magento did.

Moreover, the official announcements made by eBay spokesperson, Marketing Head & senior VP revealed that Ebay plans to continue focusing on its two other flagship products – Magento Community & Magento Enterprise Edition that can better support & equip small & medium size merchants in the fast-evolving e-commerce landscape as well as developing the next generation of their platform – Magento 2.

In another news put forward by Recode.net, it came out that Magento previously cut dozens of employees(nearly 50) including its product & marketing departments as well while realigning its focus on its other two eCommerce software products – Magento Enterprise & Community edition that has made big success in past few years. EBay’s spokeswoman Kelly Henry confirmed the job cuts without discussing any particular no. of individuals who are being laid off.

She also told that they are consolidating their local businesses to focus more deeply on developing core Magento products that are serving more than 2,00,000 merchants worldwide. However, in an interview with Magento marketing head Craig Peasley, it was revealed that the company does not expect further layoffs related to the shutdown of both of its businesses – Magento Go & ProStores.

How EBay’s hard move is going to impact the merchants running Magento Go e-shops & ProStores?

The closure seems to affect more than 10,000 small & mid-sized businesses that relied on Magento Go & ProStores to fuel their online stores and generate millions of dollars from their huge online customer base.

As an impact of this sudden news, online sellers across the globe are really disappointed to learn that the platform is going to close in early 2015. In multiple conversations with CEO’s of different ecommerce brands, it came to light that merchants are finding it difficult to find a new platform & migrate all information to a completely fresh eCommerce solution without affecting sales & inventory. The situation worsens further for those Managing Directors who are hardcore Marketers & are not at all equipped with technical terminologies and challenges of eCommerce website development.

However, eBay announced to all Magento Go & ProStores merchants to take advantage of the checklists, planning resources & special offers in their Migration center to enable everyone to smoothly migrate to other eCommerce providers.

It also suggests using Bigcommerce for those who want to continue with hosted shopping carts while upgrading to Magento Enterprise Edition & Magento community edition if it fits their requirements. In an endeavor to further help its clients, eBay has posted a variety of resources online to help merchants decide on other options.

Darlene Shirran, the CEO of Lamppostglobes.com – an online store powered by ProStore, told Ecommercebytes that it would be very tough to remove a store that was by far the most successful & fetched majority of the online sales for her.

However, she was grateful to eBay for giving notice before 7 months of finally closing the stores in early Feb 2015. All she is concerned about as of now is finding the right eCommerce provider & migrating her store for a new transformation.

Just like Shirran, the fate of other 10,000 small businesses is undecided & can make them lose millions of dollars in taking the big risk of handing over their stores to new vendors. Despite Ebay’s senior management continually claiming to ensure that the transition will be as smooth & seamless as possible; selecting right vendor who can successfully migrate their store to other platforms would be a challenging task.

If you’re also one amongst those unfortunate store owners who are hit by this sudden shutdown, we can successfully migrate your Magento store to Bigcommerce or any other hosted or licensed platform of your choice.

Regardless of which version your store is currently running on, we can easily shift your product inventory along with fully-featured shopping cart to another platform. In case, you are yet to choose as to which eCommerce solution suits you, our migration experts & ecommerce application developers will love to talk & suggest a better option that fits all your selling requirements.

The post EBay Shuts Down Magento Go & ProStores – Puts 10,000+ SMB’s at stake appeared first on Digital Marketing Agency - TIS India Blog.