Amazon quality ecommerce for small businesses. Affordable and Easy!

This lens will be blunt and to the point and include various supporting documents and urls.

First I will introduce some of the competition like Yahoo Stores, OScommerce, Zen Cart. Feel free to do additional research on any of these ecommerce platforms.

Yahoo Stores you can get started for $39.95/mo + $50 setup fee + 1.5% transaction fees.

ZenCart, OScommerce are open source however you will require hosting ($10/mo - $25mo) + SSL certificate $69.99

*Note the three options above will also cost you thousands in development to make something similar to Amazon.

At first you may think these particular options are good. However as a professional, I've come to realize the average person, who is interested in starting a store online or website, really has no clue what is good or what is bad. I've designed, developed, and reviewed a lot of websites over the years. A couple days ago a client contacted me about a website he saw and he said "Can you make something like this?" After looking at this website my client really liked, I felt awful. My first reaction was, "Did someone pay for this?" And the answer was yes! Feel free to see the website I'm referring to http://www.mdltd.ca which in my opinion as a professional a very poor website.

As a professional I've seen this far more than once. But really what are people suppose to do? You can only act on the information provided. My client thought this website was around 7-8/10 while my rating as a professional would be more like 2-3/10. I created a quick 4pg report detailing everything that was missed in development, not touching on design aspects.

Now onto the good part!

Before I tell you about what this ecommerce platform can do take a quick look at the 3 videos available here http://www.magentocommerce.ca as that will help you as we continue.

Also I recommend looking at the feature list
http://www.magentocommerce.ca/feature-list.pdf

Now as you can see before we even start we already have a platform which is in direct comparison to Amazon's amazing ecommerce store. So right from day one you do not have spend thousands in development! Awesome right?

Ok so if your not spending thousands on development what's next? Well design of course! In the website business many of us are familiar with a phrase known as "Bounce Rate" which you can research for more information. In summary it's the percent of visitors who leave your website immediately and typically this will be 30%-40% or all visitors. Now imagine the poor website I mentioned above. It it's bounce rate is likely 60% - 80% which means on a good day 40% of visitors stay and on a bad day 20% of visitors stay. Certainly not ideal!

So now that we are focused on design we can concentrate on a few key things. Logo, Typography, Colors, Layout, and User Friendly elements that will ultimately reduce lost customers by half or more. Ideally operating with a bounce rate of 20%- 40% and I consider 40% the threshold for updating or fixing design elements.

On a side note for those of you who are using statistics software that does not show "Bounce Rate" I highly recommend using Google Analytics. And by using Analytics in conjunction with Google Adwords you can also track and easily optimize your marketing campaigns.

So hopefully some of the information I've provided is helpful and maybe you want to take this a step further.

MagentoCommerce.ca offers a couple packages which allow you to get started. All plans offered include everything required to start selling online. Domain, SSL Certificate, Hosting, Setup, Maintenance, and Platform Updates are completed by professionals. Plans are $75/mo, $150/mo, $200/mo and additional information is available on their website.

If this lens helps even one person then I will consider this a success.

http://www.MagentoCommerce.ca