Archive for October, 2007

FastCommerce.com Offers a Free eCommerce Web Service with PAYPAL

Paypal is now live on FastCommerce.com

FastCommerce.com offers a free ecommerce webstore with back office tools: it is free up to 50 products. With FastCommerce you have everything you need to run a business online. When you sign-up for a free ecommerce web-store, you automatically generate an online store with back-office management tools for order and account management, shipping, and more. Also included in the free version are related products, top-selling items, most popular items, as well reports to provide insight into your online business.

It is easy to set up, easy to use, and it is a no or low cost way to start your online business today. Sign-up, set-up and start selling right away. For as little as 4.99 a month, you can have a complete webstore with credit card processing through your PayPal account.

www.fastcommerce.com

PayPal as a payment option is now live on the FastCommerce.com site. If you have already signed up for a FastCommerce.com web-store account, then simply sign in and go to the “Set-Up” tab on the back end store management module. Then click the “Payment” tab: you will see the sign-up steps to your PayPal payment option.

The PayPal integration on FastCommerce.com is first-class. Once you sign-up for the free version of PayPal’s “business” account, and then install your passwords onto your FastCommerce.com account, the PayPal tab will automatically populate all of your product pages. It is fast, simple, and cheap.

The PayPal payment option on FastCommerce.com lets your custotmers spend the majority of the purchase process on your own website: when an order is complete the customer views an order confirmation page on your FastCommerce.com store. Even better, the customer and order information is automatically stored in your account and order management module on FastCommerce.com. From there you can process the order and have a live record of the account and the order stored on the system.

FastCommerce.com is an eCommerce web-service that offers an easy to use self-service web-store at low or no cost. It is the latest in Web 2.0 services that offers a low-cost way to start and ecommerce company. And you can do it on a well-designed and complete ecommerce system.

If you haven’t signed up for a free FastCommerce.com web-store, simply go to the home page and sign-up and sign-in to your FastCommerce.com account. You will instantly have your own webstore and management module that delivers all the tools you need to run your online business.

Add comment October 31, 2007

PAYPAL IS NOW LIVE ON FASTCOMMERCE.COM

Paypal is now live on FastCommerce.com

PayPal as a payment option is now live on the FastCommerce.com site. If you have already signed up for a FastCommerce.com web-store account, then simply sign in and to the “set-up” tab on the back end store management module. Then click the “Payment” tab: you will see the sign-up steps to your PayPal payment option.

If you haven’t signed up for a free FastCommerce.com web-store, simply go to the home page and sign-up and sign in to your FastCommerce.com account. You will instantly have your own webstore and management module that delivers all the tools you need to run your online business.

About Fastcommerce

Fastcommerce.com provides business management software to small businesses, delivered on demand as a service via the web on a free or paid monthly subscription basis. We provide small businesses with a complete fully integrated package that run their entire operations, from inventory control, sales, marketing, support, online catalog, e-commerce, backend order processing and built-in UPS and Fedex shipping tools.

The only requirement to use our software is an internet connection. Unlike a traditional software company, our small business customers do not need to buy and maintain expensive software and hardware.

Add comment October 31, 2007

FastCommerce Web 2.0 Web Services

FastCommerce.com Web 2.0 as a web service.

Self-Service

Easy To Use

Low Cost

Add comment October 31, 2007

Ecommerce as a Web Service: Self-Service, Easy to use, Low-Cost

Start Selling Right Away

FastCommerce has been design for small online businesses to overcome the Initial hurdles of setting up a new online storefront and taking orders.
We have made it free and easy to set up. You will be able to drive the whole of your ecommerce business from a single-system.

The FastCommerce shopping cart package can be set up in five minutes, from registration to activating shipping options and tax calculation; and an attractive template can be created simply by pressing a button. You can then proceed immcategories, add products, and upload images create related products, and more.

And it can be done quickly and easily. The applications have been designed to be fast and simple to use, for both you and your customer. And, after all, it is free: you can create an online store with up to 250 products, and then focus on growing your business with online sales. It doesn’t get any easier than this: set up your storefront and you can immediately beginnning to sell and process orders.

FastCommerce.com is the first shopping cart package to be designed as an easy to use and affordable utility, like web-based email, or online chat. And we will be developing many more tools to enhance your ability to sell and to profit from the rapid growth in online sales.

But don’t be fooled. FastCommerce is far more that a shopping cart. We have online and back office tools that will support the rapid expansion of your business. And it is built from the ground up on a state of the art technology platform for performance and reliability.

We invite you to give it a try. After all, it’s free.

1 comment October 30, 2007

FastCommerce In Article on Shopping Cart Options

Shopping Cart Options for SMBs, Part 2

WWW.FASTCOMMERCE.COM

By Andrew K. Burger
E-Commerce Times
10/23/07 4:00 AM PT

“Businesspeople have precious little time to learn complex systems and then to use them so it needs to be easy and accessible. Whenever possible I try to use the following guide when designing the systems: You shouldn’t need to read a manual to know how to use it — it should be self-evident,” said Daniel Vidoni, e-commerce software consultant and proprietor of Vidoniweb.com and Storefinder.com.

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There’s a wealth of opportunities available for aspiring and small to medium-sized business (SMB) e-tailers looking for shopping cart technology, as Part 1 of this series points out.

While this makes it easier than ever to find this important piece of the e-tailing puzzle, it also means startup and SMB e-tailers face greater challenges when it comes to choosing shopping cart software and putting it to good use.Ongoing rapid growth in e-commerce, the emergence of standardized Web 2.0 technology and open source software packages, shopping cart and e-tail e-commerce tools have become cheaper, more powerful, standardized and chock-full of all kinds of interactive, multichannel and multimedia features. However, perceptions of just how easy they are to use — and how easy and cheap it is to get online and start an e-tail business — often outrun the reality.“There is such an enormous amount to consider when creating these systems that in my view it should be left to professionals. If not, a merchant can become disillusioned with Internet technology and determine — incorrectly — that it doesn’t work and that it’s all hype,” Daniel Vidoni, e-commerce software consultant and proprietor of Australia’s Vidoni.com and Storefinder.com, told the E-Commerce Times.

The Front End

There are essentially two sides to shopping cart sites, Vidoni continued: “The merchant’s administration area (the back end), which allows them to manage the products, pricing and freight and things like that; and the Web site front end where visitors can see and read about the products, place orders and make payments.”

Getting the front-end user interfaces right is one key to creating a satisfying customer experience. They need to be intuitive and facilitate a smooth workflow, Vidoni elaborated.

“From a sales perspective, it is vitally important that we help make the purchase experience a good one — and good means easy, pleasant and enjoyable — the opposite of frustrating. Remember the phrase ‘it’s been a pleasure doing business with you?’ That should be your target,” he said.

As important as it is, the shopping cart is just a part of an e-tail site; it needs to be part of a fully integrated e-tail platform, pointed out Charles Han, CEO of FastCommerce.com.

“Most shopping carts today have the basic function of managing products, calculating shipping and tax, and checking out with credit cards. Most U.S.-based shopping carts also support alternative payment methods such as Paypal and Google Checkout. That’s about what you will get from 99 percent of the shopping carts in the marketplace,” Han told the E-Commerce Times.

As competitive as the e-tail and software markets are and with so many good SMB shopping cart platforms on offer at small business prices, the shopping cart in and of itself doesn’t really add any significant value to an e-tailer’s business, he said.

“Like in a brick and mortar store, you are not going be successful if all you have is steel shopping carts and some check out registers. You are expected to have a fully integrated retail system to manage your merchandising assortment, inventory, promotion, marketing, customers, product returns and financials. Nobody expects to see a shopping cart and POS (point of sale) not being of a complete retail system,” Han added.

The Back End

Equally important to e-tailing success as getting a shopping cart site’s front-end user interface and navigation features right, the back end also needs to come together.

“The back end of the Web site is much more important and complex than many people realize,” Vidoni commented. “One would think that it is where products are managed and photographs of items uploaded. However, there is a great deal more that the administration area can and does do.”

Typically, sophisticated databases are used. “A lot of time is spent on getting the data architecture right. This flows from the needs of the business. Every business is different, therefore every database structure is different,” Vidoni continued.

Like the shopping cart’s front end, the back end administration area should be well-designed and easy to use.

“Businesspeople have precious little time to learn complex systems and then to use them so it needs to be easy and accessible,” he said. “Whenever possible I try to use the following guide when designing the systems: You shouldn’t need to read a manual to know how to use it — it should be self-evident.”

Ideally, databases should be able to be exported and connected to and from accounting software packages, which allows data such as stock levels and orders and sales information to be exported into accounting software packages for processing and reconciliation, something that is frequently overlooked, Vidoni noted.

“As with many things, you get what you pay for; there are no shortcuts to quality design and implementation and the extra time and effort you invest is returned many fold over the years during which your Web site operates profitably,” he commented.

Open Source Options

As in a growing number of software market segments, open source software solutions are making their market in e-tail and shopping cart software.

“There are many decent — and free — e-commerce solutions, such as osCommerce, on the market. These products allow very rapid development and are a great way for beginners to get into Web development. When these products are used by professional developers, the results can be sensational,” Vidoni related.

Professional, well-designed templates can be incorporated within a solid e-tail system’s architecture and provide very cost-effective, good quality solutions, he continued. Beautifully designed professional template’s can mesh together with the solid architecture of these well-designed products to yield very cost-effective quality solutions. In addition, Vidoni noted, “Because the software is in the public domain it is constantly under peer review and if necessary can be modified by the Web developer to produce more customized solutions.

“I have been involved in the development of similar shareware products in the past which were developed by the global programming community and the results were incredible. Everybody contributes small fragments and everyone ends up benefiting. The open architecture is beautiful to work with and there are so many forums where questions can be asked and answered sometimes within minutes that it’s just incredible.”

Making the Investment

For e-tail startups and SMBs to compete successfully in the increasingly competitive, fast-moving e-tail market means having the willingness and means to invest the necessary capital — and the capital required isn’t insignificant or shrinking.

“For small businesses that are just launching an online store or expect online sales to be under (US)$2 million, we usually recommend a shared revenue platform like Yahoo Merchant Solutions,” Sandra Fathi, president of Affect Strategies, told the E-Commerce Times. “There are quite a few companies that will provide their hosting services and e-commerce platforms for between 0.5 and 1.5 percent of sales revenue.”

Going with an established third-party e-commerce platform hosting provider offers startups and SMBs — particularly those with limited technology expertise — a number of advantages.

“This approach also provides merchants with peace of mind that tech support and maintenance of the platform are included in their agreement. Often, these platforms are well established and fully integrated with complementary services that the business may want to leverage as well,” Fathi explained.

Aspiring e-tailers can expect to invest $50,000 and upwards for a custom developed e-commerce platform while making use of an off-the-shelf offering may run as little as a few hundred to a few thousand dollars a year, according to Fathi.

“Many small businesses just don’t have the cash to layout upfront. Having a fixed percentage on top of their cost of goods sold allows them to have better cash flow and less volatility in operating costs if something should go wrong with a proprietary platform,” she noted.

BabyRide.com, one of Affect’s SMB e-tail clients, generates annual sales of more than $3 million yet still chooses to stay on the Yahoo Merchant Solutions platform, Fathi related.

“Although they are paying about 0.75 percent of each sale (or $22,500 annually), BabyRide.com has been able to avoid hiring a full time Web developer or technology expert to maintain and update the site. Having an e-commerce platform that is maintained, supported and operating 365 days a year is worth much more to the company,” she said.

Shopping Cart Options for SMBs, Part 1

Next Article in E-Commerce: New 3-D Tech Makes Online Shopping More Like Being There

Back to Online Version E-Mail Article <!–////–> Digg It Reprints More by Andrew K. Burger Talkback

Ecommerce Free to Start, Free to Use

Free e-commerce software

Ecommerce Free To Start, Free To Use.

Free internet stores always have a catch. That is what makes the http://www.fastcommerce.com free shopping cart so exceptional. Think of it as a free utility that lets you get your online business started, like a free web-based email application. It is easy to set up, and it is easy to use. But make no mistake, this is genuinely free ecommerce that lets you create a free online store with a free shopping cart, and all the tools you need to run your business online. You can run your free web store with a complete package from online store, online product catalog, free shopping cart, order and account management, a shipping calculator for UPS and FedEx. It is free ecommerce, and you’re free to use it to grow your online business.

So open a store online. No need to wait. No need to sign up for a free trial. Sign up and get to work building your own free web store from Fastcommerce.com. It’s completely free for up to 250 products. Unlike OScommerce, our free webstore is a hosted solution: you simply set it up and it works automatically to present your free online store to the web. Our applications are a true Volusion alternative. But unlike Volusion, Monster Commerce or a Yahoo store, you don’t get charged monthly fees, or costly transaction fees. The Fast Commerce free website software is a completely free ecommerce store. You decide when you want to upgrade. Until that point our service is a free shopping cart service, and more.

When you open a store online with Fast Commerce you will find that it is easy to set up, and easy to use. So simply sign up and start building your online store. You can go live online immediately. Start selling right away.

About Fastcommerce

The only requirement to use our software is an internet connection. Unlike a traditional

1 comment October 23, 2007

Payment Gateway and PayPal Options on FastCommerce.com

Accepting Credit Cards/Securing Your Store

With FastCommerce.com, you have an online service that lets you automatically create your own online store: it also gives you all of the tools you need to run an online business, from processing orders, managing customer accounts, shipping, taxes, and more.

There are several additional steps you will need to take in order to fully automate and secure the online ecommerce process. The first step is automating the purchasing process by accepting credit cards online. This is normally handled by third-party services, and FastCommerce.com has a payment option section to guide you through the set-up process with these third-party providers.

Secondly, you will want to secure the transactions by installing an SSL certificate. An SSL certificate is an encryption technology that secures all customer and transaction data in your shopping cart: this extra step goes a long way to protecting both you and your customer.

Setting Up Payment Options: Payment Gateway

The ability to accept credit cards and automatically process transactions is essential for having a professional and successful ecommerce store. Ideally, it is best to offer your customers the ability to shop and complete a transaction while remaining entirely on your site. When customers decide to buy from you, there is an expectation that they can complete their transaction without having to leave your store. The customer enters in their credit card information, clicks on the order tab, and is taken to an order confirmation page: at this point the customer assumes that his work is done, and that the transaction is complete. How to make sure that this step-by-step process runs smoothly with each customer order?

To automate this process, you will need a payment gateway provider. How does this work? The customer enters their personal information, the billing address and credit card number, and then hits the order tab. Before an order confirmation appears, the payment gateway validates the credit card and secures authorization for this transaction. If the credit card number was entered incorrectly, the customer is prompted to enter the card again. This saves you and your customer the aggravation of getting an order confirmation, only to find out later that the credit card was entered incorrectly.

Once you process and ship the order, the funds will be automatically transferred from the customer’s credit card to your checking account. It doesn’t get any better than this.

Processing credit cards through a major payment gateway provider is an industry standard “best practice.” FastCommerce.com works exclusively with Authorize.net as a payment gateway. You simply go to payment section, click on the applications page for Authorize.net, and submit an application.

How To Apply:

1) Go to the Set-up and click on Payment

2) Click the box for: I want to process credit card transactions online.

3) To make an application, just click on the Authorize.net logo.

4) This will take you to the FastCommerce.com page on Authorize.net. There you will see payment terms and set-up.

5) Click on the PDF application form on the right hand side, and fill in the information. There is also contact information at Authorize.net if you have any questions you want answered.

6) For Company or business type, simply enter “sole proprietorship.” Unless you have already incorporated your business, this designation will be appropriate.

7) Then submit via fax or email.

Once you are ready to go live, FastCommerce.com sets up the payment gateway on your site, and we make sure it performs flawlessly. You now have a live shopping cart, one that will smoothly and effectively process credit cards on the site, and then make sure the funds are delivered to your bank account.

Payment Options: PAYPAL

PayPal is also available from FastCommerce.com as a Payment option. The FastCommerce.com offers the PayPal’s express checkout, which offers a number of advantages. When your customer chooses the PayPal option in the shopping cart, a window automatically pops up. Customers then enter in their account information and complete the transaction. When the transaction is finished, the customer is automatically directed to a confirmation page in your shopping cart; it will have all the relevant information, billing and shipping address, and a list of items purchased and a breakdown of the costs.

Even better, once your customers order is completed on PayPal, all order information as stored on your site: customer name, shipping address, items purchased, etc. This means that you can have a PayPal account but still manage it from your FastCommerce.com order and account management module. The order even gets stored in your customers order history for them to access and review at a latter date.

If you already have a PayPal account, either as a business or consumer, you can sign up with your current account and simply upgrade to “business Class.”

4 comments October 18, 2007

NEW ONLINE SEMINAR FOR FASTCOMMERCE.COM/ THURSDAY EVENING

FastCommerce Training Class

Thursday, October 18, 2007 5:00 PM – 6:00 PM PDT

Space is limited.
Reserve your Webinar Seat Now at:

https://www.gotomeeting.com/register/810282772

Dear Fastcommerce Customer,Thank you for your interest in FastCommerce.com.In order to help you get the most out of our free online store, we would like to invite you to sign up for our free training class which will cover the basics of setting up your online store on FastCommerce.

Our next class is “BASIC TRAINING AND OVERVIEW: SETTING UP A FREE ONLINE STORE WITH FASTCOMMERCE.COM.” This class will be offered on Thursday, October 18th, 2007 at 5PM Pacific Standard Time. If you would like to sign up for this seminar, please register by clicking on the link above.

If you are not able to attend the web seminar on Thursday, October 18th, or have questions in the meantime, please do not hesitate to email me at gregory@fastcommerce.com, or call 888.598.2211.I look forward to helping you get the most value possible out of the services FastCommerce.com offers to small business owners.Best Regards,

Gregory Peterson

Title:		FastCommerce Training Class

Date:		Thursday, October 18, 2007

Time:		5:00 PM – 6:00 PM PDT

System Requirements
PC-based attendees
Required: Windows® 2000, XP Home, XP Pro, 2003 Server, Vista

Macintosh®-based attendees
Required: Mac OS® X 10.3.9 (Panther®) or newer

Add comment October 17, 2007

FREE ONLINE ECOMMERCE STORE with PAYPAL

What Does Free Online Store Really Mean?

Here at FastCommerce.com we’ve been taking phone inquiries, answering questions, and offering support to our growing list of small business entrepreneurs who are currently building their free online store with FastCommerce.com. The question always comes up, if it is free how do you make money? And if the FastCommerce.com ecommerce software is free, how good is it.

These are all good questions. Here at FastCommerce.com, out goal is to provide a really great ecommerce website for small business, and to do it at a low price. Our technology is first rate, and it’s been designed to handle thousands of customers. Our goal is to make having an ecommerce shopping cart no different than signing up for Yahoo or Hotmail email: with email applications you sign up and sign in and you have access to an application that is easy to use, has lots of tools, and does what you need it to do.

Here at FastCommerce.com, our goal is to provide web based ecommerce websites that will let small business owners run the whole of their online business from a single site. Our free online store is not a simple shopping cart, but a business application that lets you sell online while also running the rest of your business with shipping, email notifications, processing orders, order and account management, and more. And there is much more to come.

So in offering a free online store, FastCommerce.com wants to earn your loyalty by offering you the best online business tools for ecommerce. We figure that if we make it easy to get started, and keep developing more tools, that we will not only earn your loyalty, but also be instrumental in your success.

We will be developing new product features, like coupons and gift certificates, and we will charge money for additional features. You will be able to choose from a list of options that will let you tailor your online store to your goals and needs. We will not bundle features together, but let you choose a highly targeted list of features so that you will spend the least amount of money to get exactly those tools you need to succeed with your online store.

Nevertheless, this is a free online store that will let you run the whole of your online business and to do it for free. The free part will not change. By signing up for our free ecommerce software solution, you are not skimping on the tools you need to run your online store. You can sign up with the security and confidence to know that your software is no or low cost, and it will give you the features you need to build a successful online store. As your needs grow, FastCommerce.com will be there with more great features to enhance both your online store and your back office business.

2 comments October 14, 2007

FASTCOMMERCE.COM IS WEB 2.0 ECOMMERCE SOFTWARE

FastCommerce.com is WEB 2.0 Ecommerce Software

Web 2.0 is simply software delivered over the web, via an Internet connection. But the big deal in Web 2.0 ecommerce solutions is that web-based ecommerce software now rivals in-house solutions in features and functions, and also in speed. A web-based application is great if it only does one thing like email, less great if it runs the whole of your business, right? Guess again.

Among the number of trends driving innovation in ecommerce software is the development of WEB 2.0 technologies that not only deliver low-cost ecommerce applications, but deliver speed and performance as well. Speed for the online store customer as they roam an ecommerce site, and speed for all the ecommerce utilities that drive the business end of the ecommerce software.

The ultimate goal of WEB 2.0 ecommerce software is to replace in-house and legacy systems with ecommerce web applications that offer the same features and functions, but at lower costs. Web applications can also be updated on an ongoing basis so that the Web 2.0 ecommerce application incorporates the best possible ecommerce web applications available at any time.

Google, and now Microsoft, are now offering many applications as web 2.0 applications. The FastCommerce.com ecommerce solution delivers ecommerce applications on this same model. We’ve developed an ecommerce software that enables small to medium sized business to have access to a single-system that can run the whole of their online store and online business are one application, delivered over the web, delivered at and no or low cost. FastCommerce.com’s Web 2.0 ecommerce includes a website, online product catalog with related products, order capture and order processing, a shopping cart, contact and customer management, as well as shipping, inventory and more.

All the tools are there in a high performance and inexpensive ecommerce solution that will let small business grow their online stores while not having to worry about costly investments, or having an in-house IT department. With the FastCommerce.com Web 2.0 software, Internet retailers can focus on running an ecommerce business, on customer service, not on hardware and software support.

FastCommerce.com will being rapidly developing products and features to its main ecommerce software: the goal is not simply to be an ecommerce shopping cart provider, but a platform that gathers together all the features and functions (for example, ERP) that a small business need to run the whole of their business. FastCommerce.com is a small business ecommerce utility that is pure Internet Web 2.0 in easy of use, speed and performance, and at low or no cost for businesses large and small.

About Fastcommerce

The only requirement to use our software is an internet connection. Unlike

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1 comment October 13, 2007

Fastcommerce.com

Archive for October, 2007

Paypal is now live on FastCommerce.com

PAYPAL IS NOW LIVE ON FASTCOMMERCE.COM

Paypal is now live on FastCommerce.com

About Fastcommerce

FastCommerce Web 2.0 Web Services

Ecommerce as a Web Service: Self-Service, Easy to use, Low-Cost

FastCommerce In Article on Shopping Cart Options

Shopping Cart Options for SMBs, Part 2

The Front End

The Back End

Open Source Options

Making the Investment

Ecommerce Free to Start, Free to Use

Free e-commerce software

Ecommerce Free To Start, Free To Use.

About Fastcommerce

Payment Gateway and PayPal Options on FastCommerce.com

Accepting Credit Cards/Securing Your Store

NEW ONLINE SEMINAR FOR FASTCOMMERCE.COM/ THURSDAY EVENING

FREE ONLINE ECOMMERCE STORE with PAYPAL

What Does Free Online Store Really Mean?

FASTCOMMERCE.COM IS WEB 2.0 ECOMMERCE SOFTWARE

FastCommerce.com is WEB 2.0 Ecommerce Software

About Fastcommerce

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