CRE Loaded is one of the top eCommerce online solutions for small businesses. With a wide range of features, online store owners can set up shop quickly and easily. The complete online store and shopping cart application uses and Open Source solution and templates for easy design. With a help center, trouble ticket system (24 hour response time), and online chat operators that are available 24/7, online store owners are able to focus on the business instead of the back end.
CRE Loaded has been in business since March of 2000 and is powering more than 40,000 online shops around the globe. They are continuing development geared toward shop owner’s ability to promote their stores in their own unique way. eCommerce solutions for small businesses have been leading up to this for almost ten years. It only gets better and better, making it possible for almost anyone to set up shop and successfully profit.
The hardest part of any business, whether it be online or brick and mortar, is setting up shop, acquiring a clientele and having a pleasing environment with easy check out. There are those who have great product and business ideas that never get off the ground due to roadblocks in setting up shop and maintaining a back end process. Online stores have the advantage of no overhead and can turn a profit quicker, if the store owners can set up appealing, user friendly sites. CRE Loaded is the backend administration that is needed to get online stores up and running successfully.
Templated formats help the business owner select from well designed shopping pages, complete with check out system, that really work. The business owner has the ability to customize colors, graphics and text to make it personalized to their own needs. Once setup, the back end works to accept payments and help the business owner turn a profit in a short amount of time. Brick and mortar store owners of the past wish there was a way to have set up their shops so quickly and so effectively. Where it took years to set up a successful shop back then, it can take only weeks to accomplish the same thing.
Unless you are gifted in the area of graphic design it is probably best to develop a logo for your ecommerce site with the help of a professional.
You should know that many local designers may charge as much as $1,000 or more for a unique logo design depending on the amount of time the logo takes to meet your specifications. These professionals will work with you to come up with a way to brand your name or product in the minds of your visitor. The importance of a quality logo can’t be overstated.
It is possible to locate a much less expensive online solution to your logo needs. It is possible to receive a stunning business logo for as little as $69, but you might also get something less than perfect for that price.
Many online logo development firms charge a certain fee and allow you the opportunity to make a specific number of revisions. You begin to pay more when they have to return to the logo design past that predetermined number of revisions.
A quality logo presents your online and corporate image to clients. If that logo looks like something that was just thrown together the overall trust factor in your ecommerce business will diminish substantially.
This same line of thinking applies to website design. It is possible you can have a quality product with a comprehensive guarantee and still have few customers. You can provide free shipping and still have a poorly performing online business if your website does not meet the professional standards regular e-shoppers are looking for.
Spend some time reviewing other ecommerce sites to gain an idea of the look and feel you will need to develop.
Interestingly many successful ecommerce websites could stand some updating. These websites have been online for a few years and were developed to be cutting edge websites when they were new. It is safe to say that these sites are missing out on functionality and contemporary site design.
In brick and mortar stores you will find owners providing a new coat of paint, store remodeling and new carpet every now and again. The same should be true for an online store.
For too long many netrepreneurs have simply considered ecommerce a novelty that draws some residual income, but is secondary to an existing brick and mortar operation. The truth is, those who have taken ecommerce seriously have discovered annual increases in online sales that are often in the double digits.
Pay attention to your online site and develop it into a premier destination for online shopping.
Developing a website is not nearly as difficult as many people make it to be. In fact, its pretty easy. You can create your own website or you can make use of a professional web design service. However, creating your own website, besides being full of fun, has many other advantages.
Obviously, you can save yourself a fair amount of time and money, especially if your site is going to need on-going periodic updates. You will avoid the frustration associated with having to work through someone else, and with perhaps having to tell them that what they have created is actually not quite what you had in mind. Inevitably, this would lead to more design fees and further delays. Designing your own website has the added advantage that you can be able to alter any aspect of your website at any time without having to consult a commercial webmaster.
A website is made of individual pages which consist of text and graphics and perhaps a few other components. Each web page is a separate file that has been created in a suitable program designed for the job. And each graphic (photo or other image) is likewise a separate file.
Each completed web page and each image is saved as a separate file in a folder on your computer, just as you would save any other file. These then become your offline website. Because these files are stored only on your own computer, your web pages are obviously not yet accessible to internet users worldwide. To make them available for others to view, you need to have them stored on a computer that is connected to the internet 24 hours a day, every day of the year and which is accessible to anyone, anywhere, who has internet access. Such a hosting computer is known as a web server, that is, it ‘serves’ a particular web page to any computer that requests to view it in its web browser software, such as Internet Explorer, Firefox or Opera.
A web server normally has a very large disk in order to store a huge number of web page files for the many individuals, companies and organisations whose websites are hosted on that server. Web server space is typically offered by the Internet Service Provider who provides you internet access (dial up or broadband) and by any other companies that specialize in providing such services. The hosting web servers could be anywhere in the world, not necessarily in your home country. Transferring your web pages from your hard drive onto such a web server is called uploading and is done via an internet connection using a process known as File Transfer Protocol (ftp).
Once your web pages have been uploaded to a web server, you have a functional website that anyone can visit from anywhere in the world. However, for people to be able to find your website, they’ll need the unique address for locating your particular website’s home page. Such an address is known as a Universal Resource Locator (URL).
The URL, therefore, must be easy for one to remember. It does not need to be cumbersome. Thus it would be inadvisable to make use of free hosting sites because you would then be provided with a such a URL, invariably longish and ultimately awkward. Many people prefer to own their own domain name. It may be a family or business name that you may decide to use, for example ‘http://www.philips.com’. Such a domain name is not expensive to register.
Finally, there’s no point in spending time developing a website if no one knows about it. This brings us to the very important aspect of bringing traffic to your site. Most people find and visit websites via search engines such as Google, Yahoo!, MSN and AOL. Getting more visitors to (or ‘hits’on) your site via search engines is done through a process called ‘Search Engine Optimization’ (SEO). For this to be easier, you need to have a site concept, that is, the overall theme and purpose of the particular site. This should attract a good number of qualified visitors (or traffic) to your site, quite obviously because the search engines will direct these visitors, using your site concept.
