After a TON of work learning about ecommerce, shopping carts, security, vendors, permits, and the law, I am excited to announce that I’m un-officially launching our BiggerPockets Real Estate Investing Store!

The store is now live with a whopping two (2) products available for sale! (hey, we all have to start somewhere)

I’m quite pleased with the current form of our template, and I know as things evolve, our design and navigation will no-doubt, improve! After testing and re-testing our secure cart provider, E-Junkie, I have concluded that we’ve made the right decision in choosing them. This is not to say that I haven’t already found some issues that I’m not completely happy with, however, in comparison to the other solutions that I tested, it does what I need it to. I plan on bringing these minor issues up with the company’s founder, someone that I’ve found to be quite amenable to suggestions.

That said, stop by and check the store out. I’d love some feedback! I’ll be adding new products as time goes on and plan on an official launch, perhaps as early as next month. While we could just go and add every real estate book or product, we will only carry products that either our website’s team or our users have endorsed. This is our commitment to providing quality goods to our users. I think it is what will certainly separate us from our competitors.

Meanwhile, you can also get a dose of free real estate education from our real estate forums (6,500+ extremely helpful members).

Thanks to everyone who has been helpful during this process. I couldn’t have done this without your help.

The other day I introduced a new shopping cart to you called E-Junkie. Since then, I’ve spoken to a few people who use the site and wanted to share their thoughts. I did register to give the technology a try, as it really looked intresting to me . . . while I haven’t gotten anything set up yet, I am pleased with what I see. Navigating the back end is easy, and setting up a product is equally as easy. It seems like these guys have thought of almost everything. While the site began as a solution for processing payments for downloads, it has emerged as a viable solution for people selling tangable goods.

Each of the three people I spoke with who sell tangable goods were extremely pleased with the technology and customer service from the company, and none of them had any complaints themselves or had heard any from their customers. (click on thumbnail for larger image):

A Look at 3 Sites Using The E-Junkie Shopping Cart

Brendan Gill – Repeater Store

The Repeater Store has their own custom designed website, yet has implemented the E-Junkie ecommerce system into their site. They use small snippets of code for the View Cart and Add to Shopping Cart buttons, which are strategically placed on their site. The E-Junkie technology takes care of the rest. There is no need for a complicated system hosted on your site to do this.

Brendan tells me that he is extremely happy with E-Junkie, and would highly recommend it to anyone. In addition, he mentioned how responsive the company is to suggestions for improvement, which is a major plus! Finally, he talked about how good the customer service was, which is also a huge plus.

Craig – The Hamptons Honey Company

The Hamptons Honey Company website was apparently built completely on a platform offered by E-Junkie. I was told that Craig just uploaded his logo and images, edited the sidebar, footer, and header, added product descriptions, and his site was up and running.

According to Craig, setting up his store was “a joke!” He was enthusiastic about how easy it was to do, and told me that the support that E-Junkie offers is nothing but excellent. His site has been around for close to 8 months now, and he has had no issues or problems whatsoever. His only issue was in the reporting system, which he said needed some improvement, however he said that this should not disuade anyone from using the company.

Mike Cosman – Sweet ‘n Heat

Mike over at Sweet ‘n Heat has only been around for a few months now, but he is happy with E-Junkie overall. For now, he is only selling one product on his site, but this stands as a testament to the adaptability of the technology. All that his designers needed to do was place 2 buttons on a page that had his product’s description, and the shop was up and running. He actually told me that his designers have also used the cart and are also quite happy with it. He plans on adding new products soon, and I’m sure it will be a snap!

Closing Thoughts

I just wanted to end by saying that so far, this looks to be very promising to me. The few people I’ve told about the site have also said that it looks very promising. With nothing but positive reviews so far, I’m thinking that I might give it a shot for real. I’ve got a call in to Robin who is one of the company’s founders to discuss things a bit more, and will hopefully share anything new with you. He did respond very quickly to my comments/thoughts on the previous post about the company, and seems to be very much interested in getting the word out about his company. BTW – I did ask if he’d be interested in an interview . . . I hope he agrees so I can share more with you all.

While I’ve already begun to set up my e-commerce website (not even close to being complete, BTW) using OSCommerce, I’m still not 100% convinced that I’ve made the right decision. One of my ecommerce mentors Dave Pitlyuk (he doesn’t even know it yet) has suggested that I use ZenCart instead, but that has made the indecision even worse here. With that in mind, I continue looking for quality ecommerce shopping cart solutions while SLOWLY building the framework of my shopping site.

Introducing E-Junkie “Fat-Free” Shopping Cart

I don’t actually know much about E-Junkie other than what I’ve seen on their site and a few other resources, but their technology looks very promising. Essentially, you can add their shopping cart to any site, including blogs, myspace, etc. Their service provides a pop-up-like cart that is not really a pop-up, which integrates with Paypal and Google checkout. It looks like it is really easy to use and it could make setting up an ecommerce site quite simple. In fact, it seems like it only takes minutes to get things up and running, and to be honest, I am quite tempted to really try it out.

The problem for me is, however, that I haven’t heard very much about the company. In addition, I cannot find any real contact information on the website. Seems like a company offering this kind of service would go out of their way to publicize a phone number or real address. I guess I’d like to see a few more websites using their shopping cart solution.

If anyone out there knows anything about E-Junkie, please let me know. I’ll add any resources regarding the company to this page in an effort to inform other out there who are curious. Here are a few that I’ve been able to scrounge up:

E-Junkie Articles and Reviews

• Weekly Site Review – E-junkie
• E-junkie is addictive
• Review: E-junkie is an Addicting Storefront Solution
• E-JUNKIE Shopping Cart… sharp product, sharp price
• Another Plug for e-junkie (More on E-Junkie from a regular user)

E-Junkie in Action: Some sites Using the Cart

• MUVAudio.com
• TheoWorlds
• Bingo Card Creator

Again, please let me know if you have anything to say about this company, good or bad. Thanks!

Non-Existent Free Templates

As many of you now know, I’ve been working on getting an ecommerce website up and running. I decided to use OScommerce for my shopping cart, but now I’m beginning to have second thoughts. I’ve been looking for a few days now and have not been able to find any even half-decent free templates.

I’ve worked with many different web-based programs (wordpress, phpbb, etc.) and have never had a difficult time finding great free templates. I’m just amazed that no one out there is offering them for OSCommerce. My guess is that if someone did, they’d do quite well financially from ads served on their site.

Poor Search Engine Results for “Free OSCommerce Templates

The worst part of it all is that when doing a Google or Yahoo search for “Free OSCommerce Templates” all you get are results from companies offering limited trials to their templates, which expire; you then have to pay to get anything. These guys have worked the SERPs to get themselves high priority rankings. I’d have to say that I haven’t seen a worse set of results from the search engines then this.

Does Anyone Know Where to Find Any Free OSCommerce Templates?
If you do, please help me out here! I’d love to create a large master list of these resources, but so far I’ve struck out.

The Master List – As Begun 5/7/07 – Know of Any Others?

http://how2make.blogspot.com/

After close to a month of research, exploration, and a lot of procrastination, I’ve come to a decision on the shopping cart solution I’m going to be using on my new online store. I’ve decided to go with OSCommerce for several reasons: affordability (free!), expandability (lots of plug-ins aka contributions), support (huge forum support community), and gut feeling (gotta go with the gut, right?).

I’m still lacking in proper information for Getting Started Setting Up an ECommerce Website, but I figured I’d learn as I went.

Here’s How Far I’ve Gotten With My eCommerce Website:

• Created a subdomain to put store onto: http://store.biggerpockets.com/
• Installed shopping cart onto new subdomain. (set up database, uploaded files, ran through install software)
• Initial steps customizing and configuring cart (I’ve filled out the basic info, but there is a ton of information that I’m not sure about. This is going to be tough to figure out!)
• Secured the administration panel through CPanel (OSC does not come with security for its admin panel)
• Replaced the OSC logo with the BiggerPockets logo.
• Started to look for any templates I could use to modify the cart (I’m not finding too many good ones, though)
• Begun to look for useful plugins (known as contributions for you OSCommerce newbies); here’s a decent list.

I realize that it is not much to look at, however, for me, the hardest part of setting up a script/application is deciding on using the application itself. I think the process will go fairly smoothly from here. I’ll keep you all in on the progress of things!

Introducing Shopify, A Hosted eCommerce Solution

I just found out about a cool new ecommerce solution called Shopify. The site is a beautifully designed web 2.0, Ruby on Rails hosted ecommerce site. According to the few reviews that I found about the site, setup was extremely quick and easy.

The site is free to use, and you are only charged a 3% commission once a sale is complete. This can drop down to 2% if you sell over $10,000 in goods. Users can use Paypal or a merchant account to handle payment and everything from security to maintenance is handled by the Shopify team.

From what I saw, all of the ecommerce shopping sites created with shopify look incredible. They are attractive and easy to navigate. Other key features that caught my eye were: timeline based order tracking and the ability to track orders through an RSS feed.

The biggest problem I see is that it is a hosted solution. In its current form, I would have no way to set up a shop on my server using Shopify. I’d have to send all my traffic to their site (my subdomain) if I used them. This presents a problem for me.

It looks like I’ll be passing on Shopify, and another hosted solution I found called RightCart, but if you don’t care if you host your own shop, I think it is certainly worth a look.

Here are a few other reviews of the site:
TechCrunch: Shopify was worth the wait
CNet: Shopify makes quick work of setting up shop

Sample Shopify Website:
Conrad’s Coffee Company

ECommerce and Shopping Cart Security: What Are SSL/TLS Certificates

We’ve all seen it before . . . when we go to a website with a secure connection, there is a little lock in the bottom right corner of our browser. It usually shows up on shopping sites or other places where we might be sending secure information through the web.

What is it and what exactly does that lock mean? These sites are equipped with SSL or TLS certificates. According to webopedia:

(pronounced as separate letters) Short for Secure Sockets Layer, a protocol developed by Netscape for transmitting private documents via the Internet. SSL uses a cryptographic system that uses two keys to encrypt data − a public key known to everyone and a private or secret key known only to the recipient of the message. Both Netscape Navigator and Internet Explorer support SSL, and many Web sites use the protocol to obtain confidential user information, such as credit card numbers.By convention, URLs that require an SSL connection start with https: instead of http:.

Back when I talked about gaining user trust with a privacy policy, I mentioned that it is imperative that your user be comfortable giving you their credit card, and they MUST trust your site. Having a SSL connection usually does the trick! Hackers have a much more difficult time stealing encrypted data then stealing non-secure, non-encrypted information.

NOTE: TLS or Transport Layer Security is a more up-to-date version of SSL

For a more detailed explanation of the SSL /TLS process (technical explanation) check out these links:
What is SSL and what are Certificates?
Transport Layer Security (Wikipedia Definition)

We now know that it is imperative for any ecommerce site to have either SSL or TLS, but how do we go about doing that? I don’t know, but once I find out I’ll let you know. I will share with you the various companies that I find offering SSL or TLS certificates, and will do my part to compare them. In addition, once I find someone I’m happy with, I will also share the process to install a certificate on your server.

Stay tuned!

I found some more good resources for folks looking to get a start in ecommerce:

Rating 5 Free Open Source Shopping Carts
In Five Free Open Source Shopping Carts, Matt Jackson looks at features such as ease of installation, payment integration, category and product management, customer retention tools, and inventory management, while comparing several shopping carts. The five free open source shopping carts that he compares are osCommerce (one of the most popular), ZenCart (basically osCommerce with mods), Agora Shopping Cart, NoPCart, and Commerce.Cgi. In the past, I set up both osCommerce and ZenCart, but never went live – I just wanted to see functionality. Both seemed great (they had tons of users, many mods and help forums, etc.), but finding a decent template for free was a problem back then (this was at least a year ago).

Assorted eCommerce News & Info
The four things that ecommerce site owners should focus on are 1) Copywriting, 2) improving search results pages, 3) doing more with email sign-ups and 4) co-registration says Anne Hollind, President of Research Marketing Firm, Marketing Sherpa in the following podcast.

Stephan Spencer recommends incorporating forums in your ecommerce site to encourage participation and increase site stickyness. I can attest to this technique, as forums (once momentum is reached) can really keep people around!

Does ecommerce really work? Of course it does! Ecommerce is absolutely the way to go if you are already established as a brick and mortar business, or if you just want to do business online. Startup costs are relatively low, and the world is potentially your oyster if you’ve done things correctly! I am not speaking from experience, but I’ve been around the net long enough to attest to this!

If you’re looking for a good examination of the ecommerce industry as a whole, check out three ways to build an ecommerce business to $500 million in revenues. I’m pretty sure it is not as easy as it sounds, but looking at the 3 models (1. Build up $500m in sales in a single vertical, 2. Build up $50-100m in sales across each of 10-5 verticals, 3. Build up less than $5m in sales in each of 100+ categories) makes it seem a bit more doable. Of course, there aren’t too many companies doing $500m in a single vertical, but articles like these not only give a broader view of the marketplace, but also provide some inspiration for where you can go if you do things right and get a bit of luck in your corner.

While continuing to research how to create an ecommerce website, I found a decent article (very basic) about getting started selling online. The first thing mentioned in the piece, a discussion about user privacy, will be the focus of this post.

First, you will need to write a privacy policy that will protect your company and provide your customers with trust in your site. Online buying is based on trust, and customers deserve to know what you plan to do with the data you collect.

This is competely true. I won’t even consider buying from an ecommerce site that doesn’t have a privacy policy. It is just simply unprofessional not to have one in this day and age, and is an essential piece of the puzzle.

Writing Your Privacy Policy

Writing a privacy policy seems like a daunting task, but doesn’t have to be. There are quite a few privacy policy generators that make this tedious task much simpler. The first one I came upon fom WebDevTips looked nice, but was a bit simple. It did not allow users to modify the statement to their needs. That led me to find a generator that I will certainly use when the time comes to launch our ecommerce site. Created by the Direct Marketing Association (the DMA), this Privacy Policy Generator lets you cater this statement to your every need. Just enter your company name and contact information, then use the simple to use check-box questionaire, and you’ve got a personalized privacy policy!

Back in November, I posted about exploring ecommerce solutions in an effort to set up an ecommerce site. I was able to get some initial research done, but did not get very far. So, I am now restarting my quest to learn and set up an ecommerce site..

Finding ECommerce Blogs

My first step was to see if I could find any good ecommerce blogs. I did a search and could not find one that rivals what sites like Problogger does for blogging. That is quite disappointing!

In the search, however, I did find a site that I found to be interesting. Through their ecommerce blog (which I found to be mostly a corporate blog with a few good posts on analyzing other ecommerce sites), I eventually came to the main Varien site. This company is a design firm focusing on ecommerce solutions. They seem to have a pretty nice portfolio, but there is no pricing info on the site – you have to call to get a “custom quote.” I might give them a call if I get stuck doing it myself, but for now, it is just good to have the site to refer to.

Finding ECommerce Information on Forums

Striking out in finding a good ecommerce blog, I decided that maybe I could find some kind of detailed, step-by-step guide to setting up an ecommerce site. Again, after a few searches, i have nothing to go on. At this point, I decided to go to one of my favorite places, SitePoint to see if there was anything good in the commerce section of their forums. While the forums are quite active, the only sticky topics are not detailed walk-throughs for setting up a site . . . they are: 3-D Secure Payer Authentication, FAQ: Merchant Accounts, Detailed List of Online Monetary Transactions Providers, and Comprehensive List of eCommerce Software / Systems.

I’m sure these will all come in handy, but for now, they don’t look like they will get me started at step 1, which is ???

Building a Wiki Site
Last month I mentioned that I was looking into setting up a Wiki and that I had chosen MediaWiki to do so. Since then, I’ve set up my first wiki (it is a work in progress), a real estate wiki. The set up was really easy – like most scripts, the basic install just required setting up a php/mySQL database, a few configurations, and we were ready. Modifying the script and learning how to run and manage the wiki took a bit longer. I’m still feeling my way around, but I’m pleased with how it is turning out!

Creating My First eCommerce Website
Just to make things a bit more complex for myself, I’ve decided to create an ecommerce site – my first – as a complement to one of my other sites. I’ve made half-hearted attempts in the past to do this, but this time is different. After some initial research, I’ve narrowed my shopping cart script choices to OSCommerce and Zen Cart. I felt like they both had the largest support base and it appears like they are two of the most touted shopping cart solutions.

Now that I’ve got the initial first steps figure out, I’m totally lost when it comes to ecommerce. I’ve explored the forums at both Zen Cart and OS Commerce, and I’ve searched for tutorials / blogs that help walk you through setting up your own ecommerce site, but have failed to find anything halfway decent. If anyone has any recommendations, please let me know. Regardless, I will do my best to try and explain how to go about doing it, once I’ve got it figured out. Wish me luck!