Affordable, Cheap, Inexpensive Website Solutions - APSWebSolutions Blog

Ecommerce is the buying and selling of products and services by businesses and consumers over the Internet. Sometimes these transactions include the real-time transfer of funds from buyer to seller and sometimes this is handled manually through an eft-pos terminal once a secure order is received by the merchant.

E-commerce can provide the following benefits over non-electronic commerce:

Reduced costs by reducing labour, reduced paper work, reduced errors in keying in data, reduce post costs.
Reduced time. Shorter lead times for payment and return on investment in advertising, faster delivery of products.
New Markets. The Internet has the potential to expand your business into wider geographical locations.

Payment Gateways
PayPal and Authorize.Net offer credit card to bank account payments.

Ecommerce Software
The software can be developed from scratch by web developers in custom PHP, classic ASP or ASP.NET. Or you could use open-source software like Joomla, Magento and OS-Commerce.

Imagine a web site that would allow your customers to place an order for your goods and when they sent their order to you, your stock or inventory database was updated immediately, outwards goods were notified and the customer was sent an advice from packing staff when the goods were shipped.

Labels: ecommerce, payment gateway

In custom PHP or classic ASP you can have an admin panel similiar to the one shown so that you can manage the content on your website. The advanatages of having a custom website is that you can make changes to your website. With 3rd party softwares like Joomla & Wordpress there are limitations. Customising those softwares are not always easy as we have to work within their framework. So if you need a simple 5 page website, WordPress would be good for that. If you need a simple ecommerce website, Joomla would be good for that. WordPress & Joomla come with their own administrative panel via which you can manage your website. However if there are more complex requirements in your website, it is always better to go with a customised website as your website and database can be scalable. It will also be easier for the programmer as they can change the code according to your requirements.

Labels: Managing your website.

Recently I needed to create custom forms for a client's website, in Joomla. I found Chronoforms to be very useful. It is more than 4 years old. It comes with a huge list of features with a very easy to use drag and drop interface to help you build any type of form you may need. I was able to integrate my forms with Virtuemart tables using PHP code. I was also able to submit the form data via email as well as post it to a database. This came in handy because I was not able to create custom forms within virtuemart easily. So I simply used virtuemart to display the products and their options in the front end of the website. Then I simply used Chronoforms together with Virtuemart tables to gather information from the visitors and send them to Paypal to pay! My client gets an email with all the selections a visitor has made and the amount they have paid. After that my client goes to paypal to verify if he actually recieved the amount. He can also see this transaction information in the joomla admin panel.

Labels: chronoforms, Joomla

Video marketing is the next big thing on the web. It is underused by many marketers and fantastically profitable for those that do use it.
Many people don’t use video promoting simply because they do not understand how to start on it. It’s not actually that troublesome and you will find it outstandingly simple when you actually use it.
Videos can very simply go viral and you’ll end up getting lots of traffic from them. The search engines love video because it is highly regarded currently. You can frequently see a variety of videos in the top five ranking, for any key phrase in Google.
Making the videos doesn’t need to be tough. You can create a live action video using your mobile telephone or digital camera, or if you live in the dark ages, a webcam. Promotional videos can be made by Windows Movie Maker, which is installed on most Windows XP and above computers or on an internet site such as Jing or Animoto.
Set up a Google Alert for your video name and you will be surprised to see how far a single video will get you. So long as you have put your URL in the description and in the video itself, then you will get a good amount of traffic from this.
Video marketing is emerging as a extraordinarily strong and effective method of getting traffic. It is still under used and one that you can begin to use to further boost your sites in the search engines.

Labels: marketing, video

Well-organized web content is one of your best sales tools! It drives visitors to your site, positions you as an expert, gives you higher search engine rankings, and keeps clients coming back for more. Before you build your web site you need to spend some time organizing the content and information that will appear on your site. There are many ways to organize your site’s content. Home Page – Give an overview of your services. Start with a headline, tell who you work with, briefly describe a problem your target market has, and then tell how you solve it. End with a call to action (example: “Contact us today for a free quote”) About Us – Your bio builds credibility. Photographs of you and your staff are appropriate here as well.

Who We Work With – Give more detail about the clients you work with and how you help solve their problems. This helps qualify clients by letting them know exactly what you do and what you don’t do. Your time is valuable and you don’t want to waste it on prospects that are looking for something you don’t provide. Services – Detail the services you offer and end with a call to action (example, “Call or email us to learn more”) Testimonials – These are important so if you’re not already gathering them, start now!

Contact Us – Give people several easy ways to contact you. Consider placing a well-thought out “request for quote” form on the contact page as a way to qualify leads. (If they don’t take the time to fill out the form they may not be serious prospects. You might want to limit how much time you spend trying to turn them into a client.)

Labels: cms, website content

I recently integrated Post Affiliate Pro for one of my clients with their existing website using API integration. It is a good affiliate tracking software. Once you go through their online documentation, it is easy for a developer to integrate it with your website. I used the Click Tracking (Pap_Api_ClickTracker) and Sale Tracking (Pap_Api_SaleTracker) methods for integration. I simply updated my client's database with the affiliate id and campaign id when a customer comes to the website from an affiliate's link. So every time a sale takes place, the affiliate gets a commission. Their online documentation is very helpful.

Labels: affiliate, affiliate pro, api, commission, tracking

English might be the dominant online language for the time being, but that’s changing fast - right now there are over 1.3 billion people online for whom English is not their first language. Taking that into account, along with research that shows 85% of online consumers will only buy from a website in their own language, and you can see exactly why it’s a good idea to go multilingual with your online presence.
If you plan to have a CMS website, WordPress has features to easily translate your website into different languages. Google Translate is also a nice feature to plugin to your website. Now a days many websites have their own toolbar integrated with Google Translate API so that a site visitor can easily get a web page translated in their language.

Labels: Google Translate, Multilingual, WordPress