Cart32 Blog

Calculating shipping is a huge part of running your business. You don’t want your shipping prices to be off or obviously you will lose money or overcharge your customer. At times, it can be complicated to try and figure out how to get the exact amount, especially with bulky boxes that only weigh a few pounds. That’s alright, I am about to show you how to calculate dimensional shipping through the online shopping cart.

When planning out your ecommerce site design, you always want to be thinking about usability. A fantastic looking site is essentially worthless to you if your customers can’t find the product they want to purchase easily. This is where the ability to search your website comes in to play and really starts to show its importance. Giving your customers a way to search for and find exactly want they want will help keep customers on your site and ultimately help your number of orders.

Starting up an online business is a big endeavor with many decisions that need to be made.  However, once up and running you will be taking a part in the 266 billion dollars of projected sales in 2012 on an ecommerce site, according to Forrester Research.  Practical Ecommerce has three great tips on figuring out what to sell, which will bring you that much closer to opening up shop. 

So, I’ve talked about Pintrest, which is a pretty cool bulletin board site that allows you to post all sorts of things and promote your ecommerce site. Well I’m going to do you all one better. Enter Fancy. Fancy is another bulletin board site but is designed with businesses in mind. With Fancy, it allows people to post their wares and then, like Pintrest, share these posts. People will see these posts and can then “Fancy It”, thereby spreading the item to their friends and so on.

There are many tools out there to help optimize your usage of search engines. There are some that cost money and there are some that are more economical (read free). Some of the tools will work the same while others offer different services. I’m going to name a few of the free and paid tools and summarize what they offer.

So you are going to be sending out an order and you are wondering how to package the product? When packaging, you need to think about how this product is going to be handled once sent out. Just visualize your product being dropped. Is it going to break? Is the product now ruined? You need to be prepared for this, since shipping is a part of nearly all ecommerce transactions (auto-download products excluded). Package your item as if it WILL be dropped. Also, is your product going to be defective if it comes in contact with water? If so, better use some packaging to keep water off the product. Is there a lot of space inside the package? If it was to slide around in the back of the van, could the products inside smash into each other and break? Below I will give you some packaging options to prepare for all of this.

As our mobile phones become more and more like our personal computers, the security risks begin to parallel them as well. Your smartphone can browse the internet, check email, and now run an application that can do just about anything. Using applications that are infected with malware can lead to some particularly nasty security issues involving your phone and your personal information. This is especially important with more and more smart phone users purchasing from ecommerce sites on their phones. Application markets such as the App Store do have regulatory moderators who remove malicious applications, however some still manage to stick around for a while.

Improving pay per click advertising is important for small businesses. It is the fastest growing form of advertisement today and can really help drive customers to your ecommerce site. What is pay per click advertising you might ask? Well, marketers will specify a certain amount of money per click on the advertisement’s key words. These keyword generated ads are then placed on big traffic sites like Google and Facebook.

Cart's support team has been hard at work for the last months to get all of our knowledgebase articles, youtube videos, and support documents updated for the release of the long awaited v8.0 of the cart. Well, I can safely say that we have completed updating old videos to the new design of the web administration that came with v8.0. Click past the break to find a link to the videos.

So you know about Groupon, Living Social, and other daily deals sites.  Well Facebook is getting in on the game in a slightly different way.  They call it Facebook Offers.  Facebook Offers will allow businesses to add discounts and specials to their Facebook pages.  These Offers can then be posted as Sponsored Stories or put on your news feed.  Unlike daily offer sites, Facebook Offers are free to whoever wants them.  When someone clicks the ‘Get Offer’ link an email will be sent to that user with the offer.  The user can then use that offer either online on in a brick in mortar store, if available.