If you have the desire to tackle the many shopping carts that you can customize you might want to look into Zen Cart, Candy Press, or OS Commerce to mention a few.
If you take on the challenge of selling online there is one forum that is a must for you. I'm talking about Creative Shop Talk. If you are new to this forum simply create a free account to access all of the information inside. When you come to the home page of this forum you will see the following statement:
"We are three things in one, Support, Resources and Promotions to your online E-commerce site. CST is a peer to peer group of online business owners who run their own website stores and come together to share their experiences and support with each other."
Listed below are some of the threads that make this such a great place to research and grow your business:
CST MEMBERS CORNER:
- CST Welcomes Our New Members
- Seller Support
- Site Review
- Members Offering Free Mentoring
LET'S TALK ABOUT OUR SHOPPING CARTS:
- Your Business Plan
- What To Think About When Shopping For A Shopping Cart
- Hosting And Domain Names
- Candy Press ASP Carts
- Zen Carts
- Other ASP Carts
- Other PHP Carts
PHOTOS AND IMAGES:
- Logos And Banners
- Photo Image Software
- Photo Tips And Cameras
These are just a few of the many Topics that can be found at the Forum. The nice thing about it is even though you may not have one of those carts that require all the programming you can still get some great advise for the cart that you do have.
I printed out a three page explanation of what I could do to our site to better it in the Search Engines from one of the members, now tell me where are you going to find someone that doesn't have a financial interest in your business that will help you for free?
Thank-you very much for the support and wonderful article on our forum at CST. Yes the most important thing is that we don't have an invested interest in your business and we aren't trying to make any money off you. We will do all we possibly can to support all online business sites by sharing our experiences with you. We know and understand what it takes to run an online business and don't care to be all alone in trying to figure it all out. Perhaps there is a catch to all of this, we want to form a strong community of hard working online business owners where they can come together and feel safe enough to open up and share with each other. From my own personal experiences out here in the online business world, it gets to be a little bit confusing at times and we are dealing with some new adventures that many of us have never encountered before. We do out best at CST to promote not only support, resources and promotions to your business but to push the concept of independent thinking so that you can make the best decisions based on your own business needs and shared resources and support. No one cart is the solution because you have to look at so many other factors when building your business and then determine what works best for you based on your time, learning abilities, cost and so much more. This is not an easy task and with a community willing to reach out to one another we do seem to feel a little less stress in planning and working our sites than being totally on our own.
ReplyDeleteAlana