SalesCart Team

A Different Kind of Free Ecommerce WordPress Plugin

June 2, 2015June 3, 2015SalesCart Team

by SalesCart Team

WordPress is now the most popular way to build a website on the planet. One of the things that makes WordPress so unique as a website (and blog) building tool is its mix of “ease of use”, cost (it’s free), flexibility, and access to hundreds or even thousands of free themes, plugins and functionality add-ins.

According to w3tech in 2015, nearly one out of 4 websites on the Internet uses WordPress.

Literally anyone can create a website for free (or very inexpensively) using WordPress. However, virtually every website and blog eventually grows up to needing ecommerce. Building a website by an individual store owner, merchant, or small entrepreneur is easy with WordPress but adding ecommerce has typically been much more challenging. Many of the ecommerce plugins available on WordPress require advanced skills or an advanced web designer to integrate. This is because these solutions are complicated and traditionally “take over” all or most of the look and feel of the theme.

A free ecommerce WordPress Plugin that makes integration easier, provides more theme flexible, 100% security, and more social/mobile scalability.

In contrast, the new free WordPress Plugin, E-Commerce by SalesCart provides users the same “ease-of-use” that they have come to expect from the rest of the WordPress platform. This plugin provides a full featured electronic shopping cart that can be added in minutes to any WordPress website. It’s also free for the first 10 products which is plenty to start with for most merchants. SalesCart eliminates the complicated tasks of integrating elements of the shopping cart into the website theme and the result is the shopping cart always works with any theme.

Picture-in-Picture E-Commerce ™

What makes SalesCart different is that it uses the principal of (PIP) Picture-in-Picture ecommerce ™. Most ecommerce software will take over all or part of the “design” of a website. In fact, ecommerce stores work in one of two ways and WordPress ecommerce plugins are no different. First, some take over all of the theme, and may require you to even use their website design themes and even to use their hosting. In other cases, you have to integrate parts of the shopping cart functionality into the WordPress theme. In either case, sewing together shopping cart functionality into your theme is complicated, time-consuming, and its’ also not a good way to design a website.

In both of these cases, the website design and theme become indistinguishable from the store because the look of the website and the cart are permanently intertwined. This makes the integration of the cart difficult because if something doesn’t work, you have to figure out what’s broken. Is it the cart or the theme? Worse, when it comes time to change the WordPress theme, the shopping cart often breaks and has to be reintegrated all over again. If a new feature of the shopping cart evolves, it may require reintegrating it into the theme. These sorts of things are expensive, complicated, and time-consuming. Furthermore, for a small company, its expensive to constantly pay a web designer to fix it and make both play nice together.

In addition, web designers building ecommerce websites for others can greatly trim the time, overhead, and increase their profit using this concept. The final web store created by a designer for a merchant will be easier to maintain, easier to change, and more flexible to the design of information marketing which is the job of the website in the first place.

Easier

Why is PIP ecommerce so much easier? With PIP ecommerce, the shopping cart is “shown” inside of the website like viewing a smaller picture inside of the larger picture of your TV screen. It no longer matters what your theme is and you could change your theme every week if you wanted to. It works just like changing the outer channel but leaving the inner channel as is. The same is true in reverse. If a new shopping cart feature is introduced, it just works…you don’t have to do anything to make it work in your theme. Best of all, it keeps all of the functionality of finding, viewing, and buying products all together so your customer can easily find it without having to look all over the website and navigation for it. So, it also creates a more user friendly shopping experience for the end customer.

More Secure

With PIP ecommerce, it doesn’t matter where you host because it doesn’t rely on the security of your web hosting. It isn’t directly sewed into your website design and thus removes both your website and web hosting from the scope of security (and requirements like PCI). Most ecommerce solutions handle security in one of two ways. First, some make the merchant 100% responsible for security. In these cases, the merchant has to make sure the hosting is secure and that it is properly scanned once per quarter. The merchant is also responsible to make sure they choose and properly connect to a secure payment gateway. Secondly, there are other solutions that do all this for you by forcing you to host the entire website with them holding your entire web store as hostage.

However, SalesCart PIP ecommerce provides 100% security, immediately, no matter where you host. It is the first shopping cart that is out of scope for PCI because it “NEVER” stores, collects, or transfer sensitive card holder data. When your customer arrives at the screen where they enter their sensitive credit card data, it uses a different approach. The data is collected, and directly transferred by the customers browser itself and sent directly to the payment gateway over the Internet. This sensitive data is never transferred or stored on your web store, web site, or web hosting. This not only makes it more secure for merchants and their customer but greatly simplifies PCI security compliance and eliminates PCI fees.

Better Social and Mobile Scalability

The other thing that PIP ecommerce provides is better social and mobile support because it is more scalable and easier to syndicate. With PIP ecommerce, the actual store is no longer “tied” directly to the website. So, the web store can live totally “independently” on Facebook in the same PIP world as it does on a website. Customers are not linked from Facebook back to a totally different website when they choose a product or choose to checkout. Shopping carts or web designers that do this do not understand Internet shoppers. This very bad approach results in less conversion. Linking customers from the secure world of Facebook to a marketplace or off of Facebook to a totally different website to finish a transaction cause shopping cart abandonment! Shopping cart abandonment is when a customer only continues a little bit further in the buying process, starts to feel the uncertainty of the security boundary just encountered, becomes apprehensive, and simply leaves half way through the buying process. With PIP E-commerce, customers completely buy and checkout inside of Facebook and never leave the security and sociability of the Facebook platform. This is because the shopping cart “Picture” can be displayed inside of the Facebook “Picture”, just like any other website. Selling from Twitter becomes just as easy and free. In addition, this same concept applies to the free instant mobile app SalesCart also provides. A lighter mobile version of a SalesCart store can act totally on its own inside of any mobile phone to sell products and this acts just like having your own mobile app.

Sell on Pinterest with a Free Pinterest Store

April 28, 2015April 30, 2015SalesCart Team

by SalesCart Team

With SalesCart (http://www.salescart.com), you can setup a Pinterest (https://www.pinterest.com/) online store as fast as you can click a few buttons. It is free for the first 10 products, and it is also very simple. In fact, it is so easy to build your Pinterest Store that you can literally list a new product every 5-10 seconds.

Pinterest has been sneaking up on Facebook and Twitter as a social media powerhouse for quite some time. In 2015, it is expected that nearly 50 million users will use Pinterest (www.pinterest.com) and that’s just in the U.S.

Selling on Pinterest is an opportunity that most online businesses have yet to tap into. It is a great new potential to get products in front of over 50 million eyes. What makes Pinterest such a unique new social sales platform is that pinned products can literally self-promote like a viral sales force who are working for free.

Here’s How to do it

Each time you enter a product into SalesCart, it will automatically create a Pinterest social button to sell your product. Naturally, your customers can pin these products to their boards. However, you can also pin your own products into your own “Online Store” Board attached to your Pinterest business account. The only thing you have to do is set up a special Pinterest board called Online Store. If someone clicks on the pinned image, it goes directly to your buy-now product detail page. Every time someone shares your pins, they will share part of your store and become a de-facto salesperson and distribution point for your products. Here are the exact steps:

Build your Pinterest Store Board

Step 1: Build your free SalesCart store by visiting http://www.salescart.com and clicking on the Start Now button or by going directly to http://www.salescart.com/FaceBook/Getting-Started/default.html#FreeStore. Also, setup a Pinterest business account.
Step 2: Once the products have been added, visit your Facebook store or Mobile store and view each product, click on the tab labeled Tell Others, and then click on the Pinterest button.
Step 3: A new window in Pinterest will be launched. If this is the first product you are adding, click on the “+ Create a board”, click your mouse in the name field and type “Online Store” and press Create Board. Finally, click on the board and click on the Pin It button.
Create a Pinterest board to pin and sell your products
That’s it! When someone clicks on your Pin Image, they will go directly to your store and to your product page to buy the product. Your recent pins will also show up in Facebook if you have Pinterest enabled to share with Facebook.
Example Click to Buy Pinterest Pin
Just delete a pin and re-add it to update an image if you need to.
Here’s what a final Online Store board might potentially look like.

Summary

SalesCart makes it easy and secure to sell on social websites like Pinterest, and Facebook. It takes less than 10 seconds per product and anyone can do it. SalesCart allows you to sell up to 10 products for free and since both Pinterest and Facebook are free, you have a ready-made social avenue to distribute and sell your products, or start-up any business, without spending a dime.

Can your Online Store be turned OFF?

March 18, 2015March 19, 2015SalesCart Team

by SalesCart Team

Many people new to ecommerce don’t realize many web stores and online ecommerce websites can be completely turned “off” and not just by some random hacker, but by their very own customers! In fact, customers who are highly security conscious may already have their browsers set so that your shopping cart and Internet store is running completely dark or doesn’t operate correctly as you intend.

The result: an ecommerce storefront that
just plain doesn’t work.

Even worse, most merchants will probably never even hear about it and never even know about it. Very busy Internet shoppers and potential customers will rarely contact a web merchant to tell them,

“Hey just wanted to let you know I tried to order something from your store, and couldn’t, oh well, so I bought the same item from someone else. Have a nice day.”

So, a merchant can think that their store is working perfectly fine; because for them, and their friends and families, it does. However, they could be loosing customers every day. How many customers are they losing? Who really knows for sure? It could be 10, 100, or even thousands of lost customers per day or per month.

This has to be a rare problem that most ecommerce storefront solutions don’t have — right? We are sorry to have to tell you, but no. You’d be surprised at how many ecommerce store front software solutions exist on the market that suffer from this deficiency in design. It could be on the order of over 40%-50% or above. Also, the cooler the solution may seem to work, the more likely it could have this problem.

Hackers know this too

This is not just a problem with websites that don’t work for merchants. It’s also a security problem. In these cases, hackers can use this ability to exploit your web store. By turning certain parts of your online store on and off at key points during the process, they can by-pass certain things your store would normally do that are critical. These things could include determining the price of an item or verifying a discount. It could also be other things, like verifying security elements. In these cases, a hacker could obtain items at different prices than you list them for, or break other parts of the shopping cart, to exploit security data.

Does your ecommerce solution have this problem?

Are you considering an ecommerce solution to build your business on that has this problem? Alternatively, do you already have an online store that you’ve built your business on that might suffer from this design deficiency? Did you already lose thousands of dollars in sales and opportunity costs on an existing store that you don’t even realize? All the while, your competitors might have gobbled up those sales on their own working store fronts. Well, we want to arm you with the knowledge of verifying this on your own. If you want to check and see if a web store front that you currently use, or are considering using, suffers from this problem, it’s pretty easy to check for.

How to test your web store or ecommerce solution
First, set your browser to be more secure

In Internet Explorer: Click on the Gear icon in the upper right hand side of the browser, and select Internet Options. Then select Security. Make sure Internet is highlighted. Click on the Custom Level button and scroll down to where it says: Scripting>>Active Scripting and select “Disable”, then Ok and Ok. [Note: To re-enable: follow the same process but choose “enable” instead.]

Internet Explorer Settings Image — Internet Explorer Settings

Internet Explorer turn scripting off — Internet Explorer turn scripting of

In Google Chrome: Click the chrome menu in the top upper right hand corner of your browser that looks like 3 lines, Select Settings, scroll to the very bottom and Click Show advanced settings, Under the “privacy” section, click the Content Settings Button, select “Do not allow any site to run JavaScript”. [Note: To re-enable: follow the same process but choose “Allow all sites to run JavaScript (recommended)”]

Next, using your browser go view the store

Visit your web store or the web store that you want to check by typing in the address in your browsers address bar. In some cases, functionally might still work but not as well as before hand. If that is the case, its not really a problem. If it at least works, that’s great. Also, the further the customer gets, the less we really have to be concerned. This is because the further the customer goes in our checkout, the more likely they will contact us if there is a problem because they have invested more time.

Does the product catalog still appear or does it suddenly show no products?
Try adding an item to the cart. Does the product get added to the cart?
Select a product with attributes or options. Can you still see the product attributes and options or do they suddenly disappear or quit working?

What you should be most concerned with is if the entire catalog of products no longer works at all or is completely not displayed. Also, if something important like the “option/attributes functionality” suddenly stops working, that is also very bad. If you can’t add an item to the shopping cart at all, wow, that’s even worse.

The key is that a paranoid customer can set their browser ANYWAY they want to!

With today’s Security issues plaguing the Internet, being paranoid is really just about being 100% secure. When your customer turns these settings off (as we show you how to do above), it keeps them 100% safe from catching all kind of Internet virus, worms, Trojans, and malware from websites. However, you want your ecommerce shopping cart to take your customers order in any and every case. Your goal should be to NEVER lose any orders.

If you are lucky enough that a customer actually calls to complain, the additional time taking support calls can be very time consuming. A customer asking why they can’t see products or why they can’t add products takes valuable time away from the rest of your business. If you are having to explain to customers what they must do to make your store front to work on their browser, you are making excuses.

“Dear Customer, please open up your browser and make it less secure so you can use our web store.”

This is a bit at odds to feeling 100% secure in the first place at your online business. Finally, customers know they can find alternatives to your products via Google or Yahoo search in just a few seconds. So for the sake of your business, your best practice is to avoid ecommerce solutions entirely that stop working correctly based on a customer browser setting that you have no control over.

Stores we’ve tested

We’ve just begun testing stores but here are a few stores so far. These are the ones we were able to reproduce this behavior in so far as of this writing:

Square-up.com stores stop working
Wix.com stores stop working
Ravox.com stores stops working

Ecommerce storefront software we know that do not have this problem.

SalesCart.com

What about yours? We will work to expand this list going forward.

E-commerce Blog

February 25, 2015March 18, 2015SalesCart Team

Welcome to the SalesCart e-commerce Blog.

Here we will discuss and write business information articles on doing e-commerce on the Internet for small and medium-sized businesses. Using our Free Facebook shopping cart, we will cover gotchas, help you with marketing, show you tips and tricks and show you how you can do Internet e-commerce more economical, more securely and easier than ever before. We will answer questions like: Do you really need a website? Do you really need a web designer? Should you be using a Marketplace? We will provide information like: How does the Internet Shopper think and how is he different from a retail shopper. The things that make Facebook important to your marketing strategy. The reasonable fees to pay for credit cards and what is a good deal and what is a lousy deal. We will teach you about Internet Security and how it can make you happy or how it can make you miserable.

Thank you for joining us.

SalesCart

A Free Shopping Cart that goes Anywhere

Author: SalesCart Team

Can your Online Store be turned OFF?

E-commerce Blog