How To Use Firebug

Posted on April 16, 2020 by Team

How to use Firebug
Firebug, the Firefox extension for live debugging and monitoring CSS, HTML, and Javascript of any website, is a free and open source.

Firebug is a Mozilla Firefox extension. You can install the Firefox extension into your Firefox browser and view the CSS files.

While Firebug is particularly popular among developers and testers, it can prove to be a great tool for learners and newbies too.

If you are wondering how to get started, don’t worry. In this article, we’ll see how you can install and use the various options of Firefox. Additionally, we’ll see how you can use firebug to customize your WordPress theme with custom CSS.
Continue reading →

Tips and tricks to plan your ecommerce strategies

Posted on April 4, 2020 by Team

Are you about to take your business to a new level by creating an eshop? You are at the right place. Here are some of the very basic ecommerce tips and tricks for startup businesses. The list includes the things that you should consider while you create your ecommerce website and start selling online.

Continue reading →

BigCommerce Vs WooCommerce

Posted on January 11, 2020 by Team

Choosing your ecommerce platform is not just the first, but the most important decision you’ll make. The choice of your ecommerce platforms depends on many factors, while the usability and success of your ecommerce website directly(or indirectly) depends on your ecommerce website. So, there are many things that you should consider while choosing your ecommerce platform and those include the expected traffic, the type of products you want to sell, the features you want to see in your website, etc.

Here is a category-wise comparision of each and every feature. This will help you find out the platform that is best for the much-needed features of your website.

Performance

When it comes to performance, both the contenders deserve appreciation. Both are designed to perform and both are equally popular.

The only difference I see is that BigCommerce being specifically designed for creating ecommerce store, whereas WordPress is a blogging platform that is modified to include sales oriented features through WooCommerce

Support

You can look forward at WooCommerce for support. But the things go complicated when you are using a half dozen of plugins and add-ons from different providers.

So, if you are not very confident and feel like you will need to consult the expert and need their help on certain matters, you better go with BigCommerce. Because a 24X7 live service agent is ready for your help even when you subscribe their cheapest plan. Even though WooCommerce is widely used and very efficiently supported, it does not offer support through phone call.

And oh! The call charges won’t be applied, It’s FREE!!

BigCommerce wins!!

Customizing your site

Bigcommerce comes with a set of ready to use features. It sure does deserve appreciation for all for providing everything served in a plate. But depending upon the requirements of your business, you may need different features. The features that the ecommerce platforms comes with may not suffice, you may sometimes need more customized features. In order to get the customization – difficult

WooCommerce, with WordPress is easier to handle. Because it has modular built, which means

Pricing

BigCommerce being a commercial platform for creating ecommerce website has some peculiar pricing plans. However, it is cheaper than the other self-hosted ecommerce platforms.

WooCommerce is free and WordPress is free as well as open source. This implies that WooCommerce and WordPress, you will be able to start with the basic sales on your website without paying anything for the platform as well as the features. However for advanced features, you may subscribe to their paid package.

WooCommerce wins here, it provides you with almost-everything – for FREE!!

Hosting

BigCommerce is an ecommerce platform with the facility of hosting. You definitely will have to pay for their hosting plans. Whereas WooCommerce website will need you to find a proper host to install your website on.

Bottom line – If you don’t want to spend time to search for the best ecommerce hosting platform go for BigCommerce. If you are very peculiar about hosting and want to host your ecommerce shop on a third party host, WordPress and WooCommerce isn’t bad.

Scalability

WordPress and WooCommerce,

However a larger number of products and visitors implies that you will need more server space and bandwidth. So, you will be compelled to choose an efficient host that offers speedy page loading, brilliant bandwidth and subscribe for some more server space.

Product Management

Compatibility issues

WordPress is an open source CMS and the plugins and add-ons are created by third parties. There’s no guarantee about their compatibility. This means that if you are using multiple add-ons from different parties, they may sometimes conflict with each other and you may have a hard time finding out which one is causing the problem.

on the other hand, BigCommerce comes with an app-store that consists of tested and approved app. Most of the apps are sure to be okay with the platform and other apps. This makes it easy to choose your favorite app and integrate it into your BigCommerce website. However, WooCommerce makes it easy to choose, but compatibility is not assured.

Extensions

Others

If you’ve been researching for BigCommerce for a while, or if you happen to know how it works, you might be aware that it is highly praised for its “out of the box features”. The features that are designed to work in a specific way, to fulfill a specific task. However WooCommerce is a simple plugin that capacitates your WordPress website with sales related features. What it does is manage inventory, orders, tax, shipping details and sales. For the other enhancements, however, there are plugins and add-ons.

Conclusion

The criteria on what you judge an ecommerce platform are different for everyone. some of you might want an assured support, while some would prefer ease of use, some would look at the pricing. So, here’s everything clearly classified. Check about the things that matter to you and you can decide which one fits your needs better.

Ecommerce security – What are the threats and preventive measures?

Posted on December 8, 2019 by Team

Ecommerce is one of the fastest growing industry. The world has become a very small place due to this communication system callled internet. With ecommerce, the global market is at your finger tips. Along with great benefits, there are a few issues pertaining to ecommerce security. This article revolves around three main ecommerece security concerns.

Types of attack
Preventive measures for maintaining your ecommerce security
What to do after being atttacked?

Creating and managing ecommerce website is not a piece of cake. So, you need to make sure that your ecommerce website and its contents are protected from any kind of attack.

Types of attacks

DDos – Denial of service and Distributed Denail of service attempts to overwhelm the server with requests, making it unavailable fo the actual users. With a large number of requests, there are chances of your site becoming slow, dysfunctional or unresponsive. This is what the requests are intended for.

The unnecessary traffic through fake requests to access your website. Sometimes these attacks may just be intended for slowing down your system. A slow system is sometimes as bad as a crashed system, it frustrates users and results into a poor user experience.

SQL injection – SQL injections are harmful because they directly targets your databases. The process is to inject malicious SQL code through the web form input fields. If your data is stored in an SQL database and you have input fields whose values directly operating on the database, then your database is prone to SQL injection attacks.

As a consequence, the worst that can happen is that the attacker can intrude your data base, access the data or modify it. However, there are several techniques through which you can code your website to protect it against SQL injections. The examples are – writing parameterized queries or stored procedures. etc.

This is a wonderful article on how to prevent SQL injections.

Weak Authentication and authorization – We can define weak authentication as a state where the authentication and authorization thresholds are not enough strong to ensure protection against unauthorized attacks.

Imagine what can the intruder do if they are able to steal the username and password of your employee and now able

Passwords – Everyone everywhere insists on having a strong password. And you should too keep strong passwords as well as inspire your users to build strong passwords.

A strong password includes variation and combination of alphabets, numbers and special characters. A mix of all those to create a secure, strong and un-guessable password. So the trick is to create such passwords for your admin access, employee logins. Also make your users to choose a strong password for securing their account on your website.

Cross-site scripting – I’d like to refer cross-site scripting as one of the most annoying thing that your would face. It does not have to do anything directly with the ecommerce security but disrupts your users. Cross site scripting is done by some delinquent party to inject malicious code (mostly js) into your site. Again, this does not directly harm your website. Instead, your website will be used as a medium to deliver harmful script to your user’s computer.

That said, now you can imagine how this will effect you. When the users find out that your website has some suspicious as well as annoying scripts running on, they’re not going to like it. In worst case, these scripts, being though of as legitimate, will be allowed by the browser. It may gain access to the cookies and cache and thereby steal the sensitive data stored there. In one way or the other, cross-site scripting effects your user-experience, credibility and performance.

Price manipulation – Now this is what you really don’t want to happen, isn’t it? As the name clearly declares, this attack plays with the price of the products on your website. How terrible it is when some unauthorized party gets the access to change the price of your items.

Imagine a product that is sold at $50 at your eshop. Now someone changes it to $1. Your users are going to love it and will flock to buy it instantly, but this can cause a great harm to your business. This type of manipulations generally occurs with large ecommerce firms where there are high number of orders and individual orders are not checked for on daily basis.

Spoofing – Most of these attacks takes place when users type quite misspelled URL or if some malicious script on your website intentionally navigates your users to some other address. Wikipedia has the best definition for everything and I can’t resist to quote it right here. It explains spoofing attack as “a situation in which one person or program successfully masquerades as another by falsifying data, thereby gaining an illegitimate advantage”.

Credit card theft or fraud – The worst kind of attack is this one. With some tricks if the attacker is able to find out card details and use them, they can make purchases and even transfer funds from the card holder’s account. To make sure that this does not happen while your customers are making payments on your website, you will need to secure your payment processes. How to do that?? In the next section we will see how we can prevent such threats.

Sniffing – They steal the confidential information by digital eavesdropping on the information being transferred through the network. This captured information can be misused by the attacker in various ways.

Preventive measures to ensure your ecommerce security

1. Choosing the right platform

Ecommerce security depends very much on the ecommerce platform you choose. Even the package that you choose affects the performance of your website.

Reading the reviews about the ecommerce platform will give you a pretty good idea of what the platform has to offer and if it fits your requirements. Always start with the trial version to find out how convenient and secure the platform is.

The platform and even the package you subscribe matters for the security of your ecommerce website.

2. PCI compliant and SSL secure checkout

Payment processing and checkout are the most vulnerable parts of ecommerce transactions. PCI compliance and SSL certificate directly impose security restrictions on these parts.

PCI compliance is a set of security standards that are to be maintained by the firms and companies that process, accept or store the credit/debit card information.

Make your transactions secure using the SSL certificate. This is the best way to ensure your ecommerce security is to make your transaction and payment processing secure. SSL (which stands for Secure socket layer) implies that all the data that is transferred to and fro from the server to a browser, is encrypted. Therefore, the information your customers provide to your website will be secure. Also let your customers know that you are using the SSL secure processing and PCI compliance, so that they can trust you and carry out that transactions confidently.

3. No storing sensitive data

Avoid storing sensitive information like card number, CVV etc. Don’t store this information if you don’t need it. By not storing the information, you are in-fact protecting yourself and your website from potential threats. Because when you don’t have anything that the attackers want, they won’t bother with your website.

So don’t store the private data of your customers and keep yourself in the secure zone.

4. DDos prevention

DDOs is a very common type of security attack so smarter idea is to take the preventive measures. Some of the most common things you can do to prevent is to limit connections, using captcha, reCaptcha, etc.

You can keep an eye on the analytics and find out the patterns of the requests. This may help you detect the attack at an early stage and then take the necessary steps to counter it.

Watch this to find out how you can prevent DDos prevention.

5. Backup

There are several hosts that take automatic backup at fixed intervals. Go for a host that does this. Because backups are life-savers when your website crashes or when you are forced to take it down because of some attack or virus intervention.

During the lifetime of your website, if ever you need to restore your website to a previous point. This has nothing to do with your ecommerce security directly, but it helps you keep your data safe in case you are attacked.

6. Train employees

Train employees and make them aware of the security vulnerabilities and how to counter them. Ecommerce security is one of the most important concern while running your website and therefore it is very important for you to inform your employees about it. Make them aware of everything that they can do for ensuring the security of your ecommerce website.

7. Regular PCI scans

When you have updated your website and ecommerce platform, you need to keep in check if it is still attack proof. The bottom line is, maintaining ecommerce security is not a one time process. You should keep checking your website once in a while to discover if there are any loopholes in your system.

8. Update regularly

Keep your programming languages updated. Patching up your system as soon as a new version is released helps in every way. It may come up with some better features or reinforcing some security concern. Updates are targeted at betterment of the platform/software. So there’s no harm in updating.

What to do you do once attacked?

1. Find out the type of attack?

“To solve the problem, you will need to define the problem.”

Before starting the treatment, you need to know what disease is. Same rule applies here. There are different ways through which you find out that your website has been compromised. Once you find out that your website has been attacked, you need to find out what was the kind of attack and what is at stake – data, user details, transactions, service, etc. If you can’t define that yourself, you can take help of web security expert.

2. Consult the expert.

There are innumerable security services that you can consult if you find out that your website is compromised. You can find out such services for your location and business domain and get them to work for you. Such experts helps you find out the problem, solve it and even implement the techniques to prevent them in future.

3. Services to clean up your hacked website

There are many security services that you can find out to provide a layer of security to your website. Just search the web and find out the best service pertaining to your business domain and locality. Two of my favorites are :

Securi website security

CloudFlare

Conclusion

There are many factors that directly or indirectly effect your ecommerce security. On the contrary, there are many things that you can try to ensure the security of your website. Ecommerce is not just about setting up a website and selling online, it is much more than that. It takes a diligence, hard work, persistence and mostly, the courage to take risks.

You must know of the vulnerabilities and take steps to counter them. I hope this article helps you take the necessary steps that can help you maintaining the ecommerce security.

Must have Prestashop Modules for your ecommerce shop

Posted on December 3, 2019 by Team

Prestashop has made it very easy to create an ecommerce store. With the easy to use features and flexibility, it makes it possible to sell variety of products online. To complement your website with more features, you can use the prestashop modules.

Most of the ecommerce platform follows modular built. The ecommerce platform comes with all the basic utilities of managing the sales but the advanced features can be added later. These features are available in the form of append-able modules.

These modules generally are for the features that enhance the user experience, boosts sales and pertaining to reports, management and analytics. They can be added into your prestashop store at any time and removed as per your wish.

It’s important to note here, that your prestashop ecommerce website will run as good as without these modules. These modules can be added to the shop to enhance the features of your website. To make your prestashop store more affluent, here is the list of the ecommerce modules that you should try out to enhance your eshop and boost your sales.

All-in-one Rewards

Want to offer the provision of reward points into your website? This is the best plugin to do so. This module is designed to let your customers earn and use the reward points on your website. Easy to use, easy to manage, this module helps you boost your sales and maintain the customer relationship. It is a full-fledged system for managing reward points feature.

SEO expert module

How can a list for the must have prestashop modules be complete without a module for SEO optimization? SEO expert module comes with most of the SEO oriented features that you will need to run your ecommerce website. It’s main aim is to help you with the meta tags. It helps you boost productivity and traffic. Manage the meta tags, URLs and social media referencing through this plugin.

Customers ratings + reviews pro

Never underestimate the magic that the customers reviews and ratings can do. They are too good for generating a large amount of user generated content which is good for SEO. Customer rating and reviews enhances customer experience on your products as they are allowed to voice out their opinions of their product. The prospect customers are also affected by the reviews and ratings. Incorporate a sleek system for commenting using this plugin. Along with ratings and reviews, it also includes the features to aid the Google Rich Snippet module.

Abandoned cart pro

Abondoned cart pro sends a message to the customers when they add products to their cart but do not proceed for checkout. This module is a reminder for the customers to recall them of what they were trying to buy and did not. It surely helps you increase conversions.

Google Analytics

It’s good to keep a track of the user activities on your website. This will help you find out the traffic patterns and whether you are making progress or not. Once in a while, it is very important to find out your own flaws and work on it, rather than studying the competition. study the customer behavior and plan the modifications for your website to instigate more user actions.

Quick edit products

Quick edit products is for those who want faster result without investing much of their time. It makes editing your products very easy for you.

Sendin Blue

It’s good to stay in touch of your customers and keep them updated with the latest trend. If you wish to do this by sending the emails to your subscriber, then you should try sending blue. It is a perfect module for sending newsletter to your subscriber.

Online quotation

Let the visitors request you for the quotation of the products they wish to purchase. This can be created and managed easily using this amazing prestashop module. So provide your customers with the estimations and improve your conversions.

Conclusion

So these were the best Prestashop modules. They are the modules that add some utility oriented features into your website. Besides these features, there are many more modules and you can find it here. Prestashop is easy to use and so are these modules. All you need to do is install them and make some necessary configurations.

We would love to hear from you. Leave your opinions and reviews in the comment section below.

Selling digital products on your ecommerce website using Premium WordPress Themes

Posted on November 28, 2019 by Team

Ecommerce websites are taking the customary trade and retail businesses to a next level. The buyers are now looking for convenient ways to buy the products. The ecommerce website have successfully provided them the whole market at their finger tips.

Over the last decade, the demand and market for digitized products has inflated a lot. And therefore if you are thinking of starting an online business, there is a great scope. Digital files in the form of audio, images, ebooks, documents, softwares and applications are downloaded and uploaded in a large number everyday. For selling such digital products, there are ecommerce platforms which automatizes the process and makes it easy to protect the documents online and only allow them to be downloaded when the customer pays.

Digital ecommerce stores like mp3 downloads portal, for ebooks or any other documents, or for games and app store. These products are intangible and are available for download.

What kind of products can you sell online?

The following are the most common types of digital goods that can be sold online. These products are in form of electronic documents/files. Later, we will also discuss the popular ecommerce platforms for selling digital products.

ebooks and pdf documents

The most popular of the digital goods is “ebooks”. So, you can sell the digital ebooks using your online shop. The people who love to read now prefer to carry the digital copies of their books in their mobile devices. The hard copies of the books are difficult to carry while the digital copies are so easy to be transported. You can carry hundreds of books in your pocket and take it wherever you go.

Audio and Music

Internet is the greatest source of music. Most people prefer to download music online instead of buying CDs and disks. So, you can sell music online. There are many website that sells music and songs online. Music can be of many type : Songs, ring tones, instrumental music, etc.

Images, graphics and photographs

If you are a graphics designer or a photoshop expert and you’ve got the art then you can create and sell designed images, vector graphics, logos, icons, etc. online. The photographers can also sell the images online using the digital download tools available.

Videos & Video games

Not just images and audio, you can also sell videos online. Videos in the form of movie, documentaries, tutorials, etc. Accept the payment from the customers and allow them to download the requested video from your website.

Softwares and applications

You can sell softwares for both, computer as well as mobile phones. The best example here is – How you buy photoshop and install it in your desktop. Such products are provided in form of .exe (executable) or zip files. They are the installation files that the users can download and install.

Online Courses

Online courses are a way of delivering knowledge and specialisation through the internet. There are plenty of online educational websites, or LMS(learning management system). These systems offer online courses that you can pay for to get access.

Themes, plugins, logos, graphic designs, etc

This is the age of CMS and web platforms. The companies who design the themes, WordPress templates, add-ons sell them online. These themes are available as zipped files and they can be downloaded by the users from the theme provider’s website. The themes and plugins can be free or paid.

So, these are the products that you can sell online. Now, we will discuss the best platforms that you can use to sell your digital products online. These products are designed to let you sell your products effortlessly. Most of the platform allows you to concentrate on your products while they handle the order processing and selling process.

Ecommerce platforms for selling digital goods online

sellfy

Selling digital goods with sellfy is very simple. If you already own a website you can start selling downloadable products online buy integrating a button or you can create a storefront using sellfy.

Sellfy is used by a large number of artists and creators who sell their products and make moneyeasily. Sellfy also lets the visitors find great digital products online. It is a great place if you are a graphic designer or a musician and looking for the most convinient place to sell your products online.

Visit this page to view the pricing plans of sellfy. They charge a fixed monthly fee plus a little transaction cost.

Sendowl

Sendowl lets you sell your downloadable products online. It is a flexible, easy to use and transparent system for selling digital products online. It also has the feature of pdf stamping, free updates downloads, an affiliate system, and integrates with the best payment processors like PayPal. All you’ll need to do is get the button from sendowl on your website.

You can try their free trial version for 30 days. After that, you can choose from their monthly subscription plans. Click here to check out their pricing plans. Sendowl does not charge you based on the transactions or the sales you make.

DPD

With DPD all you need to do is upload your products and place the button you get from DPD, that’s it! DPD, like any other platform listed here, aims to help you sell products conveniently, without worrying about the background processing of the order and its fulfilment. So as a seller, all you need to do is to concentrate on your products.

DPD works with a wide range of Payment processors and supports a large range of marketing and analytics tools.It allows some basic customisation, easy upload and safe processing. Click here to check the available pricing plans. However, the good news is – You won’t have to pay per transaction charges.

Pulley

Pulley is a service from BigCartel to enable you to sell downloadable goods online. If you are not a bigcartel user, Pulley provides you with a button to sell your products online. Pulley comes with the basic ecommerce features included, it does not complicate the process with high-end features. Pulley is quite simple to use and implement.

We recommend you to take a 14 days free trials before you subscribe. Click here to view the pricing plans of pulley. It does not charge you any per transaction fee.

WordPress and WooCommerce

WooCommerce is the best ecommerce solution for WordPress. WooCommerce is one of the best and complete ecommerce plugin. It is very easy to use and flexible. Moreover, it is free! WooCommerce is a complete solution for selling your products online. It lets you easily upload the product through an intuitive form and then sell online.

WooCommerce is for selling physicals as well as downloadable products. WooCommerce lets you add features to your website using the extensions. View all the extensions here. However, you can sell your products without including any of the extensions. They are only for advanced features and enhancements.

Here is a brilliant tutorial on how you can sell your digital products using WooCommerce. Also refer this one.

Shopify

Shopify is one of the leading ecommerce platforms that lets you sell physical as well as digital products. Shopify can be enabled for selling digital products using the Digital downloads app available in the app store. It is a free app, you just have to pay the shopify fee according to the plan you choose.

Downloading and installing this app in your Shopify website makes it ready to sell your digital products. Shopify is easy to use and has flexible subscription plans. Even the people with very little or no technical knowledge can use shopify to sell their products online.

Fetchapp

Fetchapp is a highly integrable ecommerce platform for selling downloadable goods. It is designed to work with the most successful and popular ecommerce platforms like Shopify, WordPress, Goodsie and BigCommerce.

Fetchapp accepts a nominal monthly fee based on your storage requirements. There are different plans you can choose from. See all the plans here. They also have a free plan if you have a very little storage requirement.

Fetchapp is easy to use and there are many plans you can choose from. Once you subscribe, you will be allowed to use all the fetchapp features with the allotted storage.

Easy digital downloads – For WordPress

If you want to sell your electronic documents and medias using WordPress, Easy Digital downloads is the solution. As the name suggests, it is specially designed to let you sell your digital goods. Easy Digital downloads is a complete solution for selling such products.

The plugin is totally free to use. However, you will have to pay for the additional extensions or add-ons. You can get these extensions and add-ons if you want extra features like advanced analytics tools, more payment gateways, etc.

Easy Digital downloads provides you with a shopping cart for selling Digital products along with the features like download tracking, reports, discount codes, etc. There is no limit to the downloads you can provide.

ejunkie

ejunkie provides you online ecommerce tools to sell your digital products. Here’s a screenshot from the e-junkie website to show you the simple four-step procedure to start selling digital products online.

You can start with the 7 days free trial before you actually subscribe and pay. So take your time and experiment with the platform. If you don’t like it, you can stop using it without ever paying or you can continue using it if you subscribe by paying the fees.

It also has an affiliate program. This will enable you to encourage your buyers to promote your products on their website and blogs.

E-junkie charges you a monthly subscription fee and that’s all. There is no extra/hidden charges and no monthly limitations of bandwidth or transactions. They have a straightforward and clearly defined pricing plans. You can check their pricing plans here.

Gumroad

Gumroad is a unique and accomplished ecommerce solution for selling your digital products online. Along with the digital products, you can also sell your physical products through Gumroad.

You can also offer discount codes, create license numbers and sell multiple version of the same software. Visit this page to view all that you could do with Gumroad.

Gumroad directly interacts with the credit card companies. It does not use the PayPal payment processor whereas most of such companies does. Gumroad does not charge a monthly fee, instead it charges you for the transactions as well a nominal fixed cost (5% + $0.25 per sales). So, you will only pay for the sales you make.

Conclusion

So these were the digital products and the best ecommerce platforms through which you can sell them. With digital goods, there will be no shipping and shipping charges. That way, selling digital goods is much easier than with selling shippable products. There are platforms and softwares that makes it very easy to sell these kind of products online.

We’ll love to hear from you. You can leave your reviews and opinions in the comment sections below.

Prestashop review: How suitable it is for your ecommerce website?

Posted on November 25, 2019 by Team

There are plenty of ecommerce platforms to choose from to create your ecommerce website. And we understand how difficult it is to select the best one from them. The ecommerce website building frameworks come with different features and different level of flexibility and ease of use. The ecommerce platform you choose for your website also plays a major role in the success of failure of your business. Therefore, this decision needs to be taken very carefully. There are many things that you should consider while selecting the ecommerce platform.

Choosing the platform is a one time decision. You cannot switch ecommerce platforms as and when required. It’s a complicated and expensive thing to do. So cautiously choose the ecommerce platform so that you don’t have to regret it later. Now if you are confused about choosing the right platform for your website, here is a detailed Prestashop review, to let you figure out if it works for you.

Watch the live demo

What is prestashop?

Prestashop is an ecommerce platform to create an online shop. Prestashop is completely free to download and it is open source. It comes with all the basic features included and then there are addons that you can include to enhance the features.

You can download prestashop and find the hosting for yourself. Or you can subscribe the cloud based hosting service for your prestashop website.

Basic requirements

All you need is to download a free Prestashop setup, a computer with working internet connection. Besides you will need to subscribe to a hosting provider. You can also opt for the cloud hosting service for Prestashop website. Prestashop is not for people with zero technical knowledge. Whereas, ecommerce platforms like shopify and BigCommerce are really easy to use.

Prestashop – The basic features

All the features you need to sell are included in the free download. And for more features you can rely on the addons. It comes with the

The features can be managed using a mobile device too. So, you need not open up your computer every time to manage your shop. You can do it right with your mobile phone, ipad or any such device.

Prestashop templates and addons

When you are creating a website with Prestashop, you have the option of choosing from some very elegant themes. There are free as well as paid templates to choose from.

View the theme store>>

Prestashop is free to use. It comes with all the required features inbuilt. But you have the flexibility to extend the features of your website using the addons.

View the addons store>>

Payment Processing with Prestashop

Prestashop is flexible and it offers a lot of flexibility when it comes to choosing the payment processor. The default is Prestashop payments by Hipay. However, the other payment gateways are available as extra add-ons.

Prestashop supports most of the popular payment gateways and so you can choose the convenient payment gateway for your shop. This makes it possible for you to allow your users to make payment with a reliable payment gateway based on their location.

Installing and using the payment modules is very simple. Download the addons from the app store and configure it to start accepting payments.

Community help and documentation

Prestashop community now has more than one million members. The members of this community are continuously working to improve the platform and they provide consistent updates with bug fixes and added features.

Who should use Prestashop?

Prestashop is not that hard to use. But it does needs you to have some technical knowledge. There are a lots of ecommerce platforms available in the market. Prestashop can be a right choice for you if your project is medium to large sized. As mentioned earlier, you will have to spend on hosting and the apps and features for a utility oriented website.

Prestashop pricing

Prestashop is free to download and use, it is opensource. However, the add-ons that you would want to use are not free. However the add-ons and integrations are optional. You can add apps based on your requirements. You will have to subscribe for hosting or you can choose their cloud based hosting for your ecommerce website.

Ultimately, the cost of your website depends on the addons you choose to include in your website and the hosting plan you choose.

Shops that use Prestashop

Get inspired! Here are a few example websites you should take a look at before you start with your own. They’ll help you estimate what you can do with prestashop.

Click here to view the websites made using Presta

Conclusion

Prestashop is without doubts a complete and efficient system for creating your ecommerce website. It is however, not for newbies and the people who’ve never tried coding and are not looking forward to learn it anyways. It is basically free but the advanced features will cost you.

Prestashop has a great community and is a developing platform. So you can expect it to improve with every new version. The themes and apps are great. Yes, you’ll have to pay for them, but they’re really good. Prestashop also has a positive reputation when it comes to SEO.

So I recommend Prestashop to the techno-enthusiasts who want to make the things work their way and for larger website. If you want to create small basic websites with limited products and features, you can opt for Shopify, or WordPress and WooCommerce.

Prestashop surely helps you create amazing ecommerce websites with beautiful features and great looks. Prestashop is free and therefore you can try it at your localhost first.

Best BigCommerce apps to enhance your ecommerce website

Posted on November 24, 2019 by Team

best bigcommerce apps

Ecommerce platforms are flexible and easy to use and are designed to aid the non-technical persons to create their online shop.

Most of the ecommerce platfoms come with the basic features included and for advanced features there’s an app store. This is a modular way to offer features. All the fundamental facilities are already included into the platform and the additional and optional features are offered as add-ons.

BigCommerce does the same. The platform can run flawlessly without any plugin but if you want to enhance the online shop, you can visit the app store and get appropriate app,

In stock notify

When the customers land on the product detail page of a product that is out of stock, you know that it is waste of opportunity for you. However,

This app works to notify the users when an item that went out of stock recently, comes back in stock. When a user accesses the product page of a product that is out of stock, he will be provided with a form. The user will be notified when the item comes back into stock, so that he can proceed to buy it.

Know more about InStockNotify

Sweet tooth loyalty points program

If you wish to run the loyalty points program into your website, this is the app for Big Commerce.

This app is easy to customize and use. You can just include it and start your own loyalty point programme for your customers. It’s always good to provide extra benefits to your loyal customers. All you need to do is to select the action for which you want to reward your customers. This app lets you choose from more than 10 of such profitable actions.

Know more about Sweet tooth loyalty points program

Apptive

Your customers will be able to access your store more conveniently if you provide an app for your ecommerce website (also it is possible via Wp eCommerce themes). This can be done using apptive. This add-on helps you deliver better results on mobile devices. So attract more customers and let them shop through your shopping app! Helps improving the user experience and convenient mobile checkout helps better conversions.

Know more about Apptive

Yotpo

There no denying that User generated content plays an important role in your website. Yotpo focuses on It contributes positively for your SEO. Yotpo is a reviews app to allow the customers to leave reviews and comments on your BigCommerce product pages.

This mobile friendly reviews tools helps you generate UGC and

Know more about Yotpo

Optimizely

optimizely is a testing tool. When you want to decide the best method to implement for improved sales and performance of your ecommerce website, you can use this split testing tool to find out which method works best.

This tool works in the simplest way, It will show two different version designed by you to the customers and let you track the performance to find out which version converts better. It comes with an automatic goal tracking mechanism too!

Know more about optimizely

Justuno

Justuno is a plugin with combination of features that aim to improve the profitability of your website by increasing conversion of the traffic that your website has. It works on four main grounds – increased social sharing, increase email subscriptions, and reduce the abundant carts.

Know more about Justuno

zompim

Zompim is a simple and straightforward tool to track the users that are currently viewing your website and the products they are viewing. This is the best tool if you want to integrate the feature of live chat into your website.

The live chat box will be customizable so that you can change its color according to the design requirement of your website.

Know more about Zompim

Klaviyo

klaviyo is an email marketing tool that you can use to communicate well with your existing customers. It is a system through which you can send post purchase emails, loyalty appreciation emails, and targeted mails for a specific segment of customers.

SearchSpring

You know how important it is to take care of your customer’s choices, don’t you? Therefore this is Searchspring, it monitors users behavior and searches and estimates the best products. This plugin does everything to help the customers find the most relevant products on your website. You will be able to provide custom filtered searches.

Know more about searchspring

Sellbrite

Using different platforms for selling your products is a great way to maximize the sales. However, managing the inventory and syncing the sales on various platform can be extremely difficult. Sellbrite can help you here.

Sellbrite lets you sell your BigCommerce products on multiple sales channel. It enables you to list your products on websites like eBay, Amazon, Rakuten, Newegg, Sears and Etsy. It is simple and very easy to use. So, you can sell your products on more than one sales platform. You can even update your BigCommerce website with new products from your Sellbrite inventory.

Know more about sellbrite

TrueShip

TrueShip helps you manage the fulfillment once the orders are placed. It is a shipping management system that integrates with your BigCommerce shop and all your shipping carriers. It induces manageability and flexibility in your shipping procedure. You will be able to print a perfect invoice including the shipping information.

Know more about TrueShip

Social rebate

Social media is one of the best platform to promote your ecommerce shop. How good it would be if all your customers recommend your products to their friends on social media. This plugin encourages your customers to do so and earn some exclusive discount!

Social rebate is a great tool for getting your customers to promote your products. You can make your customers share your store and products with their social circles and let them earn discount on their purchases. With all the settings options available you can set up the number of clicks needed to earn the cash discount, the rebate amount, etc.

Know more about social rebate>>

Conclusion

Be careful while you add features into your website. You can use these apps and augment your simple ecommerce store. Some of the apps are free and some are premium apps. However, excessive use of apps may just make your website more complex than required. And a combination of right apps may just boost the usability of your website to a whole new level. So its all about the choices you make. The right ecommerce platform, a suitable design and the combination of the apps to magnify your website.

7 myths of ecommerce and the truth behind them

Posted on November 22, 2019 by Team

Creating, managing and maintaining an eCommerce website demands lots of efforts. Before you start selling online, you will need a proper market research and know-how about the business domain. While you search the internet for fact-finding regarding your business area, you might come across some common misconceptions about eCommerce. These misconceptions are nothing but facts that are partially right but not complete. So here are 7 myths of eCommerce with the truth behind them.

Traffic will come automatically

As the quote goes “Nothing worth having comes easy” and so, no useful traffic will come to your website automatically. But don’t let this statement unnerve you. Today, there are a number of ways you can promote your eCommerce website and inspire people to visit your website. Remember that when you start an eCommerce website, you are stepping into a domain of intense competition.

If you ask me, the hardest part of setting up eCommerce website is not designing or developing. It is to bring about traffic. The eCommerce platforms and the website building tools made it easy to create and develop a website, but the real struggle begins when your website is online and you are ready to sell. This is when you will need to find out ways through which you can bring in traffic. There are various ways to do that.

To attract traffic

Launch targeted advertisements, use cross-links and other marketing
Use social media for promotions
Optimize your product pages to rank well for the targeted keywords.

The bottom line is, the traffic won’t come automatically, but working in the right direction with a planned marketing strategy, promotions and other things like product page SEO, website ranking, directly helps you bring traffic to your website.

Setting up eCommerce is inexpensive and easy

Setting up eCommerce website is not easy at all. However, doing it right will help you sell online and make substantial profits.

Not to dishearten you, but creating and managing eCommerce websites is not a piece of pie. It will need your time, efforts, and constant contemplation before you start making substantial profits.

For a smooth running eCommerce website, you need to make some correct decisions first. Choose an appropriate eCommerce platform on which you can build your website. Next is to choose the relevant design/theme. And then maintaining and managing your eCommerce website. Keeping it updated with the products, and the latest trends. All of this needs patience and efforts.

SEO is a one time task

No it’s not! It’ s not like you will hire an SEO expert and get your website optimized, Once and for all. But it doesn’t work that way. SEO demands constant attention and modifications. You will need to stay in touch with the market progressions and keep your website updated according to the latest trends.

SEO requirements for your website will change according to the competition, market trends, etc. Also, at different period of time, you will have to focus on different aspect of your website. So, be prepared for this! SEO of your website will need constant follow ups and updations.

Click here to know what you can do to aid the SEO of your eCommerce website.

Good products are enough

Good products obviously help you to sell more. But there are other things related to the product that matter as much as the quality of the product. The most important thing you would want to make right is “Product presentation“. How you display your products on an eCommerce website really makes the difference.

There are some product presentation techniques that you must learn. The products should be well described and clearly displayed. The product pages should be easy to access and should answer all the questions that a prospective customer would have.

You won’t need any online experience if you are well informed about the physical or spot market

Not saying that your experience of market won’t help your eCommerce website, but you need to realize that selling online is a totally different thing. Consider this, you are in a shop and a customer arrives asking for a mobile phone. He will tell you the features and you will find out a phone that does exactly what the customer wants. Now, consider the same customer comes to your eCommerce website. Here, not you but your website will interact with the customer. So you need to make sure that your website has the features to let the visitors find what they want, easily.

Ecommerce platform doesn’t matter

Why wouldn’t it? The platform you choose to create your eCommerce website is like the foundation on which a building is constructed.

The eCommerce platform you choose for creating your online shop DOES matter! Even the subscription plan matters. This is because different subscription level comes with different SEO options, Security essentials and features. Therefore, the plan that you choose should include all, it should be flexible enough to let you manage the SEO of the content and the pages. Even a theme that you choose, somehow influences the success of your website.

Myths about Security of your website

Never, never take the security of your website for granted, especially when it’s an eCommerce website. An eCommerce website will have a lots of financial transactions involved. So the security of such website needs to be taken seriously.

Installing one or more eCommerce security plugins compatible with your eCommerce platform will surely help you securing your website. But the hackers always find new ways to attack and damage. Therefore, use preventive measures against potential threats. Keep checking for vulnerabilities and work to block them.

Network security is one of the main part of IT industry and it undergoes constant development and updation. Make sure you keep up with it and are not left behind.

Conclusion

These were some common misconceptions about eCommerce that are completely false. You may hear these things at first when you are new to the online business and it’s very important that you don’t believe them. However, the businesses, specially online businesses are completely unpredictable and dynamic. So, you need a careful start after intense studies, and market analysis. And nothing equals experience. After a while of surviving the market and the competition you will be able to derive better decisions for yourself.

Best WooCommerce plugins 2020

Posted on November 21, 2019 by Team

WooCommerce is Number 1 ecommerce plugin to create an online shopping website using WooCommerce. This is because of all the features it lets you use out of the box. WooCommerce comes with all the basic ecommerce features to create and run a simple ecommerce website. For the advanced features however, you have the abundant extensions and add-on that you can use to add features to your ecommerce website. Here is the list of the best WooCommerce plugins that you can include to enhance your online shop. Let’s see what they are about.

WooCommerce Multilingual

If the scope of your ecommerce website is global, then you sholud probably go for a multilingual website using the WPML plugin. But what about the product and the shop pages. Well, that is what this plugin is about. This plugin lets you translate the shop/product pages. However, you can only use this plugin if you have the premium WPML plugin.

Download WooCommerce Multilingual

WooCommerce Catalog mode

Some of the WordPress ecommerce themes designed for WooCommerce may provide you with catalog mode. But if your WordPress theme comes without the catalog mode, here is the WooCommerce aid that comes to rescue. This plugin helps you to convert your WooCommerce website into a catalog. This will change your website into a catalog while maintenance. So your visitors will still be able to see the products, contact you and send inquiries.

Download YITH Catalog mode

Stripe for WooCommerce

If you are habituated to accept payments through Stripe and want to do the same through WordPress WooCommerce website, you can use this add-on. It integrate Stripe as your payment processor and ensure safe and secure transactions.

Download stripe for WooCommerce

Product Details Customizer

You need to use the product detail page to precisely present your product and its properties. So, this plugin will let you customize the product detail page.

Download WooCommerce product details customizer

WooCommerce Product Gift Wrap

product gift wrap

Facilitate your buyers to get their products gift wrapped. This plugin will add an option of “Gift Wrap” to the products. You can even charge extra for this service.

Download WooCommerce product Gift Wrap

WooCommerce Poor Guys Swiss Knife

Just like the swiss knife , this plugin is a bundle of powerful extensions. It is free to use. This plugin provides various customization options for your WooCommerce shop. You can add custom fields, manage country specific needs, etc.

Download WooCommerce Poor Guys Swiss Knife

Pay With Amazon

pay with amazon

Save the users the trouble of creating an account on your website and adding all details required for checkout. Let them use their Amazon account for paying. This plugin allows your users to pay directly through their amazon account for shopping on your WooCommerce store.

Download Pay With Amazon

WooCommerce Customizer

This is a plugin I would recommend to someone who likes to be very peculiar about the design of each and every element of his shop. WooCommerce customizer provides you a way of customizing the elements of your WooCommerce shop. Customize the labels, text fields, buttons, etc. However, you will need a little coding knowledge to use this plugin.

Download WooCommerce Customizer

WooCommerce Checkout Manager

As the name suggests, this plugin is all about the checkout manager. What it lets you do is to customize the checkout of your website. If you do not want to go with the basic checkout that WooCommerce provides, you can install and use this plugin. You can add new fields to the checkout form if you want to collect additional information from your buyers. You can also make fields compulsory/optional and change their order of appearance.

WooCommerce checkout manager

WooCommerce EU VAT Compliance

This does exactly what the name says. Based on the customer’s location and the product price the VAT will be calculated.

WooCommerce EU VAT Compliance

WooCommerce Smart Sale Badge

When you are creating sale on your online shop, this plugin comes to your rescue. Show the customers what exactly they will be able to save by purchasing a product within the sale period. It is a smart and efficient add-on.

Download WooCommerce Smart Sale Badge

WooCommerce My Account Widget

Let your customers get every bit of their account at one place. This add-on displays all the customer particulars, like the customer account, shopping pages, cart, etc and allows the user to easily access everything.

Download WooCommerce My Account Widget

Order Delivery Date for WooCommerce

WooCommerce Order delivery date

This is a simple and straightforward plugin. Installing this plugin will allow the users to select a delivery date for their products when they checkout. This plugin will add the field and all the users will have to do is to select the date.

WooCommerce Order delivery date

Weight/Country Shipping for WooCommerce

Weight Country Shipping for WooCommerce

The world has become a small place now. Your ecommerce website can serve different countries at once. So, if you want to sell your products in different countries, the calculation of the shipping cost will be different for different places. This plugin lets you manage that.

Download Weight/Country Shipping for WooCommerce

WooCommerce – Gift Cards

You can sell gift cards to your users using this plugin. This way you can allow your customers to sell gift card to their friends and relatives.

Download WooCommerce – Gift Cards

YITh WooCommerce Zoom Magnifier

The effect of this plugin will be seen on your product detail page. The product image will be zoomed on hovering the mouse pointer on it. YITH WooCommerce Zoom magnifier is a lightweight plugin. The product detail page and the product page are the main players in an ecommerce website. So, this add-on may directly help you deliver better product presentation.

Download WooCommerce Zoom Magnifier

WooCommerce New Product Badge

The WooCommerce product badge plugin will enable you to show badges on your WooCommerce products. It will let you show new, sale, featured, etc badges on your products. It is lightweight, simple and translatable.

Download WooCommerce New Product badge

WooCommerce Photos Product Tab

WooCommerce photo products tab

Product images in an eshop are very important. If you want to display the product images in tab, then you can use this plugin. You can select the size of the images you want to be displayed in the tabs.

Download WooCommerce Photos Product Tab

WooCommerce Advanced Product Quantities

If you want your customers to buy a certain amount of quantities and only allow checkout if the condition is met, then you can use this plugin. It lets you set the maximum and minimum values. The customers will only be able to checkout if the requirement is met.

Download WooCommerce Advanced Product Quantities

WooCommerce PDF & Print

Many users will want to save the product details to their local machine or to print it. This is what the plugin lets you do. This plugin allows the users to directly download the product page and save it as pdf for reviewing later. They can also print the page directly.

Download WooCommerce PDF & Print

WooCommerce Product FAQs

Product FAQs are my personal favourite when it comes to shopping online. They’re a better way to answer the queries of your users. The Product FAQs plugin will be displayed with your product page itself. So, if any user has a question, he can add it there. This question will then be retained as a part of FAQs. This features eliminates the need of using the contact form to ask for support.

Download WooCommerce Product FAQs

WooCommerce Currency Switcher

This plugin, as the name suggest will let the users switch the currency. The plugin is very useful if the scope of your website is across different countries with different currencies. It is a light weight plugin that you can integrate and make your website more useful.

Download WooCommerce Currency Switcher

WooCommerce Colors

Want to change the colors of the elements of your WordPress WooCommerce store? WooCommerce colors lets you do that very easily. So now you can change the colors of the element to match the theme color of your store.

Download WooCommerce colors

Minimum Purchase for WooCommerce

This plugin lets you set the standards for minimum purchase through your website. Before you are allowed to checkout, the conditions are checked. If the qualifications are not met, the checkout is not allowed.

Download Minimum Purchase for WooCommerce

Conclusion

These optional WooCommerce plugins are designed for some specific purposes. They are simple and easy to use. All you need to do is to download and install the extension. Most of these add-ons are really easy to configure.

Adding more features to your ecommerce website helps you improve the user experience which may eventually result in more conversions. At the same time profusion of these features may result in unnecessary complication of your website. This may make it difficult for the customers to interact with your website easily. So only go for the features that are absolutely needed.

You can post your comments and let us know your view point. Also post your opinions, reviews or anything that can help us make this article better.