Going From OFF-Line to ON-Line

We are doing a local business here. We sell medical and laboratory equipments and supplies. Most of buyers are repeat buyers from hospital, clinics, and public health center. Orders come regularly because patients always come everyday so they need regular supplies too.

Usually they call us for ordering something. And we are about to add another method. We are going to make a website. Most of hospitals already have internet connections. We think it is possible to increase sales rate by making a website. At least we can provide products catalogs online and they will be able to find information about us faster, clearer and cheaper.

We do realize that we can not simply leave phone call method (we will still use it, maybe for price / discount negotiations). But it lacks of few things :

1. We can only inform necessary / requested informations. It is impossible (and boring) to talk for an hour, telling everything we sell.
2. Voice is voice, it can not transfer images.
3. We must open our .xls everytime. It is wasting time and very inefficient. Customers have to wait for simply getting the price from us.
4. Sometimes when we are out of town to send ordered items, we miss some calls and faxes, and we ever lost an order because of it.

And more... We still have to ask our sales, only to send printed price list every time we make some changes.

Moving from offline to online takes some times.

The first thing to do is choosing the best shopping cart software.

Second, educate our staffs. We must change the way we think, and of course they must learn anything about this ecommerce software.

And, we must be able to run business using manual method, entering orders manually because not everyone knows about internet and how to use it.

Finally, we can easily find out some necessary things to get new marketing ideas and to make us better, such as : best selling items and also best money makers, selling trends and graphs, the most loyal customers (we usually give more discount for these kind of customers), etc.

We are still compiling this genius idea right now. We hope our website will be available one or two months from now.

Ecommerce Software for Your Online Store

If you ever wanted to have your own online store, the biggest problem might be your shopping cart software. Why ? Simple, because it connects your customers and you as the owner of the store. You really have to convince customers about :

1. Easy to use shopping interface.
   You may have the best products with the best competitive price. But if your customers find difficulties when they browse your shop, they can move to other stores with that simple reason.
   
   
   
   Look at the screenshot above, an efficient shopping cart interface with good features :
   
   
   
   • Category Menu.
     Helps your customers to find the right category of what they want to buy. Additional "New Items", "Hot Sale", "Featured / Recommended Products" menus can be shown here to give suggestions to your customers.
   
   
   • This is for customers who don't know manufacturers, brand names, models, or version of the product they're looking for. Basically, customers can enter anything here and matching products will be shown. If they think that the standard search box is not enough, they can use "Advanced Search" instead.
     
   
   
   • Products should be well presented. But it doesn't have to mention all features. Only important features are shown here. The complete information can be obtained by clicking on it.
     
     On the bottom customers can edit the quantity of individual product. Then after clicking that little cart symbol, the order will be shown at shopping cart list.
   
   
   
   


2. Safety
   Customers will love buying something on your shop if you are really can be trusted. It takes time to make customers believe, but these things will help you to make it faster :
   
   • 
     SSL Certificate. You must obtain it from trusted authority. Technically, it is a protocol that provide secure communications between your customers (clients or end users) and your web server. Clients don't have to be authenticated, but your server must be clearly authenticated so customers can be sure that it is safe to execute transactions with you.
   
   
   • Hacker Free Seal Sign. An excellent reminder to your customers that you are taking information security seriously. But this not an urgent thing to have. Usually, an SSL Certificate is enough.


3. Privacy
   
   You must tell customers how you will use their submitted data. You should make a clear statement about it and you must obey it.


4. Payment Options
   Consider to implement some payment gateways because your customers can be from any country with any background. Ashop Commerce supports 65+ trusted payment gateways, I'm sure they are sufficient to handle all online orders from around the world.

About Ashop Commerce

With this ecommerce software, you only need a domain name (you can also register from the website) and they take care the rest. You don't need to host it yourself. It has a lot of features, including 128bit SSL Security, SMS Alerts, custom design (you can also build from scratch from available theme or ask them to design it for you), additional pages, etc. Too many to be listed here :-)

What about promoting your new online store ? Ashop Commerce handles it too, don't worry. Their SEO kick start package will make your new store listed on search engines focused on your wanted keywords.

They will really help you, step by step to build an online store, from planning to growing your store. Live support is always available.

Still not convinced ? Try 10 days FREE TRIAL without credit card requirement or just try the DEMO.

And webmasters or publishers can also earn from affiliate program !