What Technology You Are Going To Use For Your eCommerce Website? Chapter 5

With our previous chapters, now we are very much aware of market and its game players. I hope my previous sessions provided you a better guidance on preparing an eCommerce business plan and now as we are almost half done you must be empowered enough to make a business strategy and write your own eCommerce business plan. In this chapter we will discuss about the technologies that you should use to prepare a perfect business plan. Lets start with eCommerce platform part.

eCommerce website development is full of different kinds of platform and there are numbers of websites are also marking presence and committing you create a superb website for you. These too much of options put you in a perplexed situation of what to choose, and with whom to develop it. To solve this puzzle there is only one out, and that is by understanding the available technologies and your requirements and future plans in compatibility with each other. How you are going to integrate each other and can develop a website that delivers a smooth and efficient performance.

There are several different segment of your website which would be loaded with numbers of choices and among them you will have to make decisions and choose the most suitable one for you. These segments are,

Shopping Cart – Examples of shopping cart are,

Shopify: It is a Canadian company having a volume of 200,000 merchants. It offers 5 plans ranging from $9 a month to $179 a month. Its latest version is Shopify 2.
Magento: It is the most preferred and successful eCommerce platform and the best thing about Magento is that it is a open source platform and it community edition is totally free. Enterprise edition comes with charges and it is made for big businesses.
Bigcommerce: Its minimum plan cost is $29.95 a month and it offers only basic features. The high costing plan of $79.95 a month provides all the advance options like analytics, sales, website integration, and payment tools, and it also decrease limitations of number of products.

Payment Processor

Stripe: It provide a both individuals and businesses to make payments over the internet. It commits to save frauds and complete the secure transactions.
PayPal: It is one of the popular most mode of payment nowadays and preferred by majority of people. It provide a lot of other features as well and it also have some subsidiaries.
Authorize.net: This payment getaway facilitate you by providing payment means to businesses through credit cards and electronic cheques. It is Cybersource subsidiary company acquired by Visa.

Fulfillment Center

Amazon: It is one of the biggest fulfilment center that allows you to store your inventory and when you receive any order, just forward the required details and they will deliver the product.
Shipwire: This is spread over major parts of world, and promises to deliver best possible services at fastest speed.

Accounting

Quicken: It is personal finance management system that recently launched its newest version Quicken 2016. It provides you a reliable, accurate and free 24 hour customer support.
Xero: It is cloud based accounting software presented by a New Zealand. It manages invoicing, bank reconciliation, book keeping and many other options.
Quickbooks: It is the highest rated accounting software for small businesses. It also provide facility to use it on iPad, smart phone to do billing, generate invoices, run report and you can even make payments to your employees.

Newsletter

Mailchimp: It is an email marketing solution. By June 2014 it was sending over 10 billion emails per month on behalf of its users. It manages your subscribers and send them emails along with tracking reports also. You can also integrate it with different offers.

Customer Loyalty Programs

Sweet Tooth: It is a customizable extension that allows you to create a loyalty programs for customer retention. With sweet tooth you can build your program as per your points.

This is all that we have for you in this chapter to guide you what technology will help you up to merits. As we are a software development company and one of the best in the business, so we can be a good pick and can help you to choose the best suitable technology according to your requirements and can create an efficient, productive and an attractive website.

In our next chapter we will study about the financial part so remain in touch with us. By any chance if you have missed our previous sessions of eCommerce business planning, its fundamentals and basics, you can access to them right from here. Please visit,