Mobile Commerce, M-Commerce or mCommerce all mean the same. It offers the capability to carry out commerce via. mobile device for example mobile phone, PDA’s, Smartphone and other similar upcoming gadgets. As defined in Wikipedia, “Mobile Commerce is any transaction, involving the transfer of ownership or rights to use goods and services, which is initiated and/or completed by using mobile access to computer-mediated networks with the help of an electronic device.“

The Mobile Commerce is simply an ability provided to users to sell or purchase products, services, information etc. via. Internet enabled mobile devices. Though we can still find some traces of an eCommerce footprint, but practically there are few differences between them. The ecosystem and value chain for mobile commerce is unique and evolving in a different manner than e-commerce as a whole.

The mobile Industry is one such industry, that has experienced a drastic shift in retailing and customer behavior. Particularly in the segment of Smart-Phones, there has been a major boom that made an impact on the retailers. Unlike ever in the past, the retailers are now required to stay aware of who, how, when and why is someone shopping. Furthermore, they are required to search for better strategies that would help driving traffic into their stores. With time, there has been an increasing number of mediums that a customer can go about shopping items, and one of these means is Mcommerce, where the retailer is not aware of the mobile shopper.

Based on a recent survey, some amazing facts came into picture. Usually males are observed to shop more via. their smartphones. He might probably fall within the age group of twenty-five to thirty-five and use smartphones to do the shopping. This does not mean that females don’t go about shopping through mobiles, but the percentile states that the volume of male shoppers are more in number.

According to observations, Cell phones and shopping is fast becoming a routine habit. Approximately, 80% individuals use cell phones to shop products and services. This can be an important pointer for businesses to mold there services in a way that they can try to capture the deals made via. Mobile phones.

Individuals do search the web for price comparisons, discount coupon codes, product reviews, special season discounts etc. via. smartphones. With the evolution in the mobile phone industry, smart-phones have become one of the preferred ways to stay connected with friends and contacts via. social networking sites. And within these contacts, constant communication and suggestions about a particular brand or product takes place. This offers a large scope to promote your products and services while on the go. Every information is just a click away with Mobile Commerce.
This is an ideal time for businesses grab this opportunity and offer the prospective client with something that s/he is looking for. There aren’t any major changes that you are required to do. You can even start with choosing an affordable web hosting plan. Meanwhile, get a mobile friendly business website developed and host it over a cheap hosting UK server. Make sure that the mobile version of your website isn’t heavily loaded with heavy scripts or applications, else the visitor would simply lose interest and head onto your competitors site to fulfill his/er requirements.

Related Posts:

• All About Plesk Power Pack | A Web Hosting Control Panel Add-On
• Getting the Most out of Mobile Commerce
• Mobile Commerce
• What Is Mobile Commerce | Part 2
• What Is Mobile Commerce | Part 1

Magento is an open source shopping cart software application. It is very user-friendly and offers users a lot of options. The Magento code is constantly updated and since it is user friendly, users don’t have to worry about installing updates, as it doesn’t consume much time and could be done easily. Magento is an universal ecommerce solution mostly used by large shopping sites. Users of magento can easily add modules to their website according to their requirements.

It also includes features such as meta tags and SEO urls to optimize their eshops for search engines. It also allows users to show product comparisons. Customers can also edit their order information even if they have checked out the order process without opening a new window.

The magento ecommerce hosting package includes everything that you need for your eshop website. Fast, reliable and fully secure servers, softaculous auto scripts installer, SSL support, multiple features and high quality round the clock customer service.

Magento open source shopping cart software offers merchants the absolute flexibility and full control over the user experience, store, promotions, site content and functionality of their online shops. Magento’s admin interface consists of many powerful tools for marketing, search engine optimization of the e-commerce website and its catalog management.

The superior magento software feature-set and the flexibility enable merchants to increase revenue. The magento enterprise edition is specially designed for the companies ready to maximize the potential of their e-commerce business.

Appealing Features of Magento e-Commerce Software:

• Flexible coupons with ability to restrict to stores, products and categories;
• Admin dashboard for reports such as sales, tax, low stock, product reviews, coupon usage, total sales invoiced, total sales refunded and best customers report by total and number of orders;
• Meta tags and ability to rewrite URL’s for search engine benefits;
• Batch import and export of catalog;
• Google base and Google analytics integration;
• One-Page checkout;
• Supported multiple payment options;
• Order tracking from account;
• Advanced order management features;
• AJAX cart pro;
• Video module;
• Ability to add multiple images per product with zoom-in and zoom-out capability;
• Add to wishlist;
• Send to a friend;
• Multi-lingual support;
• Multiple currencies supported;
• Administration permission system roles and users;
• Web services API for easy integration of thirdy party applications;
• Flexibility of tax rate management;
• One-click upgrades;
• CMS for managing store pages;
• Ability of shipping to multiple addresses in one order;
• Free shipping option;
• Bundled products;
• New items promotional tool;
• RSS feeds for new products and special offers;
• Newsletter management;
• Ability to create one or multiple invoices;

Since it is an open source product, it can be used to sell any kind and any number of products. Magento e-commerce software is offered absolutely for free with any cheap web hosting package to install using the Softaculous one-click auto installer. Magento is a well architected, well designed and simple to customize e-commerce platform and I have never seen another such ecommerce application.

Related Posts:

• The reason why VPS is the ideal platform for e-Commerce Hosting | Part 2
• The reason why VPS is the ideal platform for e-Commerce Hosting | Part 1
• Options for MySQL Database
• Choosing a Domain Name and Registration Services
• Web Hosting: who, where, when and why

WHMCS is considered to be one of the very few complete billing solution for client management, billing & support solution for most of the businesses that are online today. It is basically an automated billing system designed and developed for handling almost everything ie. from sign-up to suspension. Thanks to its extraordinary business automation tools offered by WHMCS which provides full control over billing. This has been one of the widely used and trusted applications by various hosting providers may it be a small or mid-sized company that offers WordPress Hosting or a highly reputed host offering the latest in trend Cloud Hosting solutions, WHMCS has something or the other to suit almost every billing related requirements.

A Gist of Features offered by WHMCS :

• WHMCS provides support for various different Currencies, Taxation , One Off & Recurring Invoices, Quotation or Estimates & Ticketing Support for Billing
• Billing Automation – It offers an automated Payment Processing, Refunding, Fraud Verifications, Products or Domains Provisioning & Management
• Simplicity of Usage – It offers an easy to understand and use GUI, Faster Setup & Efficient Support
• Products Available – Offers Free, One-Time & Recurring, Prorata, Custom Fields, Email Templates, Stock Mgt & Promotions
• Transactions Offered – More that fifty payment processing Gateways are supported, Income and Transaction Logs plus Statistical Reports can be generated
• Support Offerings – An Integrated ticketing system, knowledge base, downloads, announcements & network issues tool is available with WHMCS
• Support for Modules – Users can create, suspend, terminate, upgrade, add SSL Certificates, update nameservers, renew & much more.
• Ease of Customization – Client & Admin Area Templates, Order Forms, Language Files & CSS Styling
• Developer Friendly – Module Development Kits, Action Hooks & a Remote API

WHMCS Features explained in detail :

Billing Related-

• The Automated Invoicing takes care of billing the clients on a recurring basis and groups the items due on a given day by a particular client all-together for reducing the gateway charges
• You can generate invoices Manually hence allowing you to generate one-off invoices for any customized services been offered
• Quotation and Estimates can be prepared and mailed across to prospective customers, whoch can later be converted into invoices with a single click of button incase the proposal is accepted
• Automation of Payment Processing is available with every gateway
• Support is offered for Taxation which enables both inclusive and exclusive tax, tax exemption offered to customers & products
• Users can generate invoices in the form of PDF document hence enabling them to download it for there records or even take a print and retain a hard-copy for accounting purposes.
• The service provider can send the invoices via. Email or Print the Invoices using a batch PDF generator functionality hence enabling you to print the invoices for users that require a hard-copy
• Apart from automated billing, WHMCS also enables users to make a payment entry Manually in order to avoid the restrictions for online payment gateways. Payments can even be applied to particular accounts who have paid via. cheques, wire transfers, etc.
• Issuance of Credit for a user account can be done via. an admin or a client which can later be included in the invoices in the upcoming payment cycles.
• Flexi Promotions enables you to offer one time or recurring discounts over products or amounts depending on your organization commitments
• Verified by Visa & MasterCard SecureCode is supported on particular payment processing gateways

Automation Offerings –

• An Automated Creation of services can be achieved in a way that as soon as an order is placed and a payment receipt is received or after the admin approves it, the services can be instantly activated automatically.
• Automatic Suspension of user accounts can be done via. WHMCS. And, only after the required payments is done, the temporary suspension can be removed and users can use the services as normal.
• Automatic Termination of user accounts can be set in a way that post a particular time frame after the suspension if the user does not make a payment the service to the account would be instantly terminated.
• Automatic Upgrades makes it simple for users who intend upgrade the product, here the calculations are automatically done in the background by WHMCS
• Retrieval or Reset of Passwords can be done automatically from WHMCS
• The late charges can be Automatically applied to invoices sent to users, based on certain pre-decided factors
• Timely Alerts & Notice can be set for user accounts inorder to notify them about the payment due dates and overdue/current charges to be paid

Domains Related-

• An automatic Domain Registration or Transfers could be achieved on receipt of payment or upon admins approval
• Users can even Renew Domains via. the client area which could also be automated upon receipt of payment
• Users get the option to enable and disable Auto Renewal of domains to avoid expiry and the later struggles
• Users can change the Nameservers due to the in-built registrar modules which allows both the users as well as the clients to make the relevant amendments whenever required.
• Similarly, the Contact Info can be reviewed and updated from time to time by clients as well as the staff members
• The feature of Locking the Domains status can be achieved using WHMCS which too is optional based on the requirements
• Inorder to serve well to the resellers, WHMCS allows its users to set private Nameservers
• If you are a domain registrar, at the time of ordering a domain, users can be offered with an option of ID Protection
• Get EPP Code is also supported with certain modules as is DNS Record Management & Email Forwarding. Ofcourse, for now this feature is available for ENOM only.

Support Tools Offerings -

• The Ticketing System enables users with managing the email requests from customers efficiently and effectively. The admin can allocate email sent to a particular email address to concerned departments.
• There exists a provision of Auto Answer Suggestions that automatically offers suggestion suggest possible answers to a users query from your knowledge-base before submission to help reduce common queries
• Rules of Escalation can be assigned in away that none of the emails/tickets are left out from answering for more that a set amount of time.
• A feature known as the “Email Piping” is offered with WHMCS which allows customers send an email to your company and generate tickets in the ticketing system
• The provision of Spam Filters enables you to avoid and restrict emails from reaching your mailbox. You can set filters based on particular keywords, key-phrases and even email addresses
• You can keep your customers updated by Announcing the latest NEWS or information through RSS

Security Features -

• As a measure of enhanced security, you can move the Writeable Directories above the public_html directory
• Furthermore, users can prefer Moving the Admin Area for avoiding the possible hacking attempts by guessing the logins
• Notifying the admin with any Failed Login attempts hence keeping a track of a possible attempts of login.
• Enabling the option to Automatically Ban an IP for more than THREE failed login attempts
• The Client & Admin Passwords are stored as irreversible md5 hash values for prevention of passwords reversal
• By using the AES Encryption protocol, the Credit Card Data is encrypted which avoids the scope of financial data thefts
• Using the API IP Restrictions access can be granted only to those IP’s whom you intend to offer

Products –

• WHMCS offers support for almost any types of products apart from merely web hosting
• Set billing cycles based on customer needs ie. Free, One Time, Monthly, Quarterly, Semi-Annually, Annually & Biennially
• Billing based on a Prorata basis is supported by WHMCS i.e. date-to-date counter billing
• Ability of configurable options for products and services whose prices are expected to vary or fluctuated in an unscheduled manner
• Support for Custom Field enabling you to gather particular data about a client account.
• Addons that enables you to cross-sell additional products & services to clients
• Downloadable Product Support
• Based on your business requirements, you can send automated Custom Welcome Emails to customers when they have sucessfully placed an order.
• Stock Management/Automatic disallowance of orders when out-of-stock

Features offered with Client Area

• Admin Client Summary page giving an overview of an entire clients account
• Complete product and domain information with the current status
• Your customers can get an overview of the services and products that are purchased from you, also available in the Client area is the option to reset their password
• The Domain Management area enables your customer to check the details of domains that have been purchased from you, furthermore, they can manage the domains from this area
• The Contact, Invoice and Payment History can be viewed by customers any time
• New Orders can also be placed via. the inbuilt order form

Feature that Enhance Customization -

• Different Server Modules that allow you automating the products activation, suspension, termination etc. Though there are multiple modules that are pre-inclusive with WHMCS but one can even create a custom module and integrate it with it
• It also offers Domain Registrar Modules for domain management & automation inclusive of registrations, renewals, nameserver modifications, WHOIS changes etc.
• Almost 50 different payment gateways are supported by the default version of WHMCS, but if you intend to have a different payment Gateway Module integrated with payment solutions you can easily get that developed from your sources and integrate it with enough ease.
• With the availability of default Templates for the client as well as the admin areas allows used to completely customize the front-end interface

Other Features –

• The provisioning of Enom SSL Certificates too can be automatically implied using WHMCS
• Based on your requirements and the expected level of security, you can set Email Alerts for number of events taking place in WHMCS ie. each time when a new ticket is replied,upon successful/failure of an automated actions, scheduled cron task, etc.
• For ensuring that your customers data isn’t lost, you can set an Automated Database Backups by FTP onto a remote server
• Support for Multiple Languages enables clients to select their preferred languages

Related Posts:

• No Related Posts

This article will help you understand the advantages and features of an authentic payment gateway. Moreover, you would be able to choose a suitable online payment gateway for your business.

Introduction

Payment gateway is a special service designed and developed with and intention of helping businesses with the online billing process. It consists of an in-built billing processor which enables the collection of credit card information and its transmission via the World Wide Web. It is a digital equivalent of a credit card processing terminal. Payment gateway is basically a software application which enables the functionality of a credit card company, enabling merchants to accept online payments.

Types of Payment Gateway

There are basically two types of payment gateways.

• A widely used Payment Gateway is a secure order form. It directs the client to a third party website for credit card payment processing into an individual merchant account.
• Another type of Payment Gateway is a merchant-side Application Program Interface (API). A integreation of code is done on the server that hosts the merchant ecommerce web-site.

Benefits of Online Payment Gateway

Payment Gateway simplifies the acceptance of online payments done via credit cards. The below benefits are offered to the merchants

• It decreases the geo-location barrier. Clients located anywhere in the world can make payments in no time. The merchants are capable of accepting payments from around the globe.
• Customers can conveniently go about with making payments with faster speeds and ease.
• The customers are immediately notified about acceptance or decline of payments in real time. This helps maintaining transparency in the payment processes.
• The payment gateways guarantee 100% safe and secure transactions. Merchants have the facility to offer a money back guarantee as well. So if a customer wishes to withdraw the services or product usage, they can claim their money back, which too would happen with enough speed and security.
• Since businesses have no restriction for payment acceptance, they can focus more on expanding their businesses across other geo-locations.
• It helps in reducing the infrastructural and the human resource costs.
• The process is remarkably faster than the traditional payment modes.
• Business hours aren’t constraints with online payment gateways, customers can go about making payments even in the non-working hours and place an order for the product
• The entire process is carried out via. a highly secure (encrypted) network. Hence, customers can stay rest assured about their money. Customers should only ensure by checking at the address bar, there in the URL you should see “https://” before the domain name. This indicates that it is a secure site with an SSL installed on it.

List of Widely used and Trusted Payment Gateways :

• Paypal
• Google Checkout
• Verisign
• Authorize.net
• Linkpoint payment gateway
• 2CO
• CCAvenue

Checklist

When selecting a payment gateway that is best suitable for your payment services on the ecommerce site, you must check the below criterias :

• You must check the compatibility of the Payment Gateways. This is one of the most important aspects when thinking of adding a payment gateway to your ecommerce website. Before making a choice of an eCommerce shopping cart, it is better that you check if your payment gateway is compatible with it.
• The Address Verification System (AVS ) protection is another important and very useful feature of payment gateways. This helps in detecting fraud payments and transactions. The Address Verification System holds the capability to verify the address of the card holders billing address. Therefore, before you select a payment gateway, you check that they offer an AVS protection facility.

Depending on the payment gateways, fixed per transaction charges needs to be borne by the merchant. Hence, it is also important to checkout the charges before choosing a gateway.

A quick wrap-up of procedures :

Pointer 1 – To make sure that the gateway compatible with the eCommerce shopping cart. Get in touch with the eCommerce web hosting provider to have a better understanding of payment gateway compatibility with a particular shopping cart.

Pointer 2 – Most of the widely used payment gateways provide more or less the same features, its only the price that usually differs. But doing a thorough research about the level of security and the price at which it is offered can help you to find a perfect payment gateway for your requirements.

Pointer 3 – Making sure that the payment gateway service offers the Address Verification System (AVS) protection. This would help you prevent the future problems with fraud payments.

Related Posts:

• Payment Gateway
• Cloud Web Hosting
• Business Web Hosting Service
• Securing Your Web Hosting Account
• Setting Up a Web Hosting Business

Choosing a host for your website can be hard work; choosing an ecommerce host for your budding online business can be even harder! An ecommerce hosting package can simply be thought of as a regular hosting package with various features and functionalities added on to save you money and make your online business easier to build and run.

This checklist is designed to help anyone with a basic understanding of web hosting find their perfect ecommerce host.

1.Don’t rush into anything – this is going to be a long-term relationship and possibly quite a big investment on your part; don’t rush into the first hosting contract that comes your way – research is vital!

2.Look for Specialists – most hosts will mention ecommerce hosting somewhere on their site, but you want to be looking for a host that features their speciality prominently, ideally on their homepage.

3.Are you a newb? If the answer is ‘yes’, are you willing to put time and effort into learning more about hosting? Answering these questions honestly will help you work out what kind of level of support you’ll need further down the line.

4.Uptime – this is the metric used to start any search for a web host, not just an ecommerce host. Look for a guaranteed uptime of at least 99.99% – remember that if your online shop is down you’ll actively be losing money.

5.Bandwidth/data transfer – again, this is a starting point in choosing a host, so make sure not to miss it off your ecommerce checklist just because there’s so much other stuff on there!

6.Competitive price – at the end of the day, the cost of a hosting package is going to be one of the biggest deciding factors. Remember however, ecommerce hosting packages will often have lots of extras included (that will save you money in the long run), so don’t just choose your host on sticker price alone.

7.Jargon spot check – even if you’re completely new to the world of hosting and/or don’t have an interest in learning more about it, you’re going to have to understand a few terms and phrases so that you’re able to choose a good host. Here are a few to get you started: SSL, shopping cart software, merchant account, payment gateway, MySQL, PHP, ASP, Control Panel.

8.Online Transactions – taking money online isn’t always that straightforward. If you’re setting up a business to sell products online, you’ll need to get hold of a merchant account and a payment gateway. Some hosts will help with this, so make sure to take a look at the specifications to see what’s on offer.

9.Shopping Cart Software – this is one of the most standard offerings in an ecommerce hosting package, but it’s still worth checking to see a) if there’s a choice of software available to you, and b) if there are any hidden costs associated with the software (eg. expensive upgrades or monthly fees).

10.Cost Check Point – keep an eye on costs as you proceed through this checklist. A good idea is to imagine you’re going to stick with a host for three years – you can then start to work out what the ongoing costs might be compared to the up front costs. This will stop you going for a cheap looking hosting package that will ending up costing more!

11.SSL – a Secure Socket Layer is essential for secure transactions on a website. Some hosts will charge an extra fee per month for this certificate, so make sure you check where you stand.

12.Analytics – you should be able to install analytics yourself once you’re site is up and running, but it can helpful to have an easy install option provided by a host. Analytics will help you understand your customers better and therefore improve your online business.

13.Customer Support/Tech Support – if you’re just starting out with an online business then you’re going to have a lot of questions and might need help at the most unexpected moments. Customer and technical support can be one of the biggest let downs for an otherwise top-notch host. There’s no way to be completely assured of quality, but reading reviews and testing pre-sales support with a few questions can be a good start.

14.MySQL and PHP Support – This should be a standard feature of any ecommerce hosting package, but, again, it’s always worth double checking.

15.Custom Error Page – A nice extra feature that will add a lot of professionalism to your ecommerce site. It’s possible to build your own custom error page from scratch, but a handy plugin will make the experience much more enjoyable!

16.Data Backup – it’s definitely worth checking out what kind data backup your potential ecommerce hosts offer: some will include regular back ups free of charge; others will only offer one-off back ups at an extra cost.

17. Email – your email is going to be very important to your online business, so better make sure you get the right hosting features for the job. Look out for POP-3 email addresses, aliases, free forwarding and auto responder functionality.

18.Community – many of the bigger and/or better hosts will have a strong online community, which may well become invaluable in helping you succeed with your ecommerce site. Check out which of the following your potential hosts have (and how robust they look!): forums, FAQs, social presence (blog, Facebook, Twitter) online support, a ‘Knowledgebase’.

19. Reviews – it’s well worth doing a bit of research around the web to find out what existing customers think of your potential ecommerce hosts. Beware though, it can be a challenge to find legitimate reviews – there are lots of fakers out there so take everything you read with a pinch of salt.

20. Your Gut – there are lots of solid things to check out for a good ecommerce host, but don’t sign anything without getting a ‘vibe’ for the company first. Do you like the look of their site? Does their sales pitch make you feel uncomfortable? Can you find any genuine positive reviews online? Have they made an effort to explain the different features in each hosting package? Are their terms and conditions comprehensible?

We hope this checklist helps you out on your ecommerce adventure.

Bio:

This is a guest post from Lucy at Who Is Hosting This. They’re currently accepting eUKhost reviews. Be sure to spend a few minutes telling us what you love about eUKhost.

Related Posts:

• No Related Posts