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!