E-commerce website hosting is a specific kind of website hosting platform used for hosting a website doing business online. It is different from a standard web hosting because it must have several business-specific functionalities and features to ensure smooth running of the website. Choosing the best e-commerce website hosting service provider is imperative for success in your online business endeavor.

What Are the Features to Consider

When it comes to e-commerce website hosting, the special features that must be considered are database support, SSL, specialized software for shopping cart management, online payment processing services, and of course security aspects. Entrepreneurs and businesses must have access to the right tools and best services that they can use to set-up and manage an online business.

All e-commerce websites must have access to the same fundamental features regardless of the size of their business or retail website. These features include a suitable domain name, the ability to process credit card payments online, and a user-friendly website. Web retailers must choose the right e-commerce website hosting service to take care of all these business essentials before they put up their business online and activate it.

Why Engage Services of an Expert

Small business owners may have a tough time finding a website hosting provider specializing in e-commerce hosting. You must have a good idea of what to look for before you start your search. Choose a reputed provider with vast experience in successfully hosting e-commerce websites and at a price that fits within your budget without diluting the essential features required to manage and run your business smoothly.

You may have to decide between shared and dedicated web hosting and then plan in detail to take care of your present and future needs of your business. There are advantages as well as drawbacks of both approaches and that’s why you will be better off hiring the services of an expert who can advise you on making the best possible move.

Shared Or Dedicated – Which One Is Your Choice

A shared e-commerce web server means you will be sharing the resources of the server with many other users as the hosting company will be running many websites on the same physical server. When you choose a dedicated server, you will be in complete control of server operations as your web site will be the only one on the server. You will be able to use all the resources and enjoy smooth operation.

Quite expectedly, the dedicated server hosting option will come at a much higher price than the shared hosting option. If you are an e-commerce business poised to take the big leap ahead, dedicated e-commerce web hosting service is highly recommended.

Managed dedicated server hosting will save you the hassle of utilizing your in-house expertise to maintain and run the server. The e-commerce web hosting company will include everything in the plan, including customization and management of the server. You will be able to tweak the services to match the specific requirements of your e-commerce business website.

Without any doubt, e-commerce business is spreading its arms with great pace, as more and more people love to shop online rather than visiting the market personally. The major reason behind the success of every e-commerce business is a well-designed and professional website that opens the door to countless opportunities for the growth of the business. For this, you need a suitable platform that can easily fulfill your desires from your website. There are plenty of options out in the market to choose from but among all WordPress is the right platform for your e-commerce website because of the following reasons.

A plethora of E-commerce plugins: No doubt, plugins will make your work easier than ever before and WordPress as one of the best CMS offer you plenty of free plugins such as WooCommerce, WP E-commerce, Easy Digital Download, Jigoshop and so on for your e-commerce website. It offers you multiple currency support, multi-shipping options, and SSL security integration, payment gateway support, community support and many other facilities. So, this is the best platform to use for your online business.

Plenty of E-commerce themes: Another major reason to use WordPress as your e-commerce platform is that it offers you plenty of free as well as paid e-commerce themes to use. These themes will help you to give an instant makeover to your website, so, that it can easily capture the attention of its customer.

Easy to install and manage: WordPress is very easy to download and install and just take a few seconds in installing and running. It also allows you to easily create your website by following some simple steps. It doesn’t require much technical knowledge and one can easily manage it and therefore, people most often use it as their e-commerce platform.

Community Support: WordPress has a large community of developers and designers in all over the world, which is always ready to support you in all manners. So, in case you get stuck anywhere, you don’t need to call your developer over and over again its huge community is always there to help you.

Since its launch WordPress update its software on the regular basis and now it becomes one of the highly used and appreciated blogging platform as well as CMS. It easily manages a large amount of data and helps you to expand your business in a short span. From the above, now you understand that you should use WordPress as an e-commerce platform.

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Magento is an open source e-commerce platform. An e-commerce platform like Magento allows a business to setup a website selling products to customers online, while providing an administrative interface where the business can manage their products, customers, orders among other things.

Magento was first released in 2008 and since then it’s grown to become the most popular e-commerce platform today (30% market share in May 2015) and is now powering over 200,000 online stores.

Magento has a free Community Edition (CE), and a pay-per-year Enterprise Edition (EE), and in this post we will mainly discuss the Community Edition and where it stands out from other e-commerce platforms.

Hosted vs self-hosted

Some e-commerce platforms are hosted, that is, they are tied to the hosting of the company. Setting up an e-commerce site with them is alike to renting a service; your e-commerce site is tied to their system. This has an advantage in that it is very easy to set up and get started, but the downside is that you don’t truly own your own site and become reliant on the provider.

Magento, on the other hand, is self-hosted, which means have your own copy of the site. The downside is that it is up to you (or your developer) to find a hosting provider to set up the platform on. The advantage though is that you completely own the site, can do any modifications you wish, and can move it to another hosting provider at any time.

Internationalization

Features for international support is built right into the platform. Support for multiple languages, multiple currencies, tax configuration and VAT are a standard part of the system and easily set up and configured from the administration panel.

Theming & Multiple Stores

Magento allows the owner to switch the theme (look) of the site without changing any functionality. Multiple “front stores”, which can be switched between by the customer and is often used to provide different language versions of the site, is built right into the platform.

A powerful feature of Magento is that it can run several websites outwards while sharing the same products and customers among the websites, all managed from the same administration interface.

Open Source

Magento itself is an open source platform, built upon open source frameworks and programming languages. This gives it the benefits of outside scrutiny into the source with the result of improved design and security, and at the same time making it more accessible for outside developers.

Customization

Because of its flexible modular architecture at its core, Magento was built to be extended. In fact, much of the core functionality of Magento are module extensions themselves built by the Magento team. This allows for an astonishing level of customization, even allowing modification of the core functionality. This level of extendability and customization sets Magento apart from other e-commerce platforms and is one of the biggest reasons for its success.

Third party extensions

Extensions allow the developer or business owner to add specific functionality to the store that is not a standard part of the platform, without having to develop that feature themselves, often saving time and money.

Magento has thousands of third party extensions, more than any other e-commerce platform, some which are free and some which are paid for.

As mentioned earlier, because of Magento’s modular architecture, extensions can modify any part of the platform allowing features that change it at its core, making extensions possible such as Reward Points that adds reward points to customer when buying products which can then be used for discounts at checkout.

Other features

Other features Magento comes built in with includes a very powerful and extremely flexible promotion and discount rule system, multiple front & store support (mentioned earlier), configurable dynamic product attribute system, sales and order tracking system, excel import and export of products, a Content Management System (CMS), newsletters and many more.

Costs

Magento requires a decent hosting server to run well; this is a consequence of Magento’s feature rich and extendable architecture. Shared hosting is not recommended, so there may be extra cost involved in setting up a dedicated server.

As mentioned earlier, the community edition which we have discussed so far is free and comes with more features than any other e-commerce platform. In the case of a site that does not require many additional features, this option can be very affordable.

Where it can become costly is when features outside of Magento’s standard palette is required because of the time and skill required to develop them. Third-party extensions are often used to extend Magento and common price range is 50 – 200 USD per extension. Compared with developing the functionality yourself this is often a great cost saving.

Magento Enterprise Edition

A quick word on Magento Enterprise Edition. This is the non-free edition of Magento, costing around 15,000 USD per year. Most suitable for very large clients, it offers additional features such as increased security, performance, functionality such as in-store credit, gift cards, ERP integration, among many others. Finally, with Enterprise Edition you get access to full around the clock professional support from Magento through phone and email.

Summary

Magento offers a complete e-commerce platform solution. The free community edition is more than powerful enough for small to medium sized businesses, and often for large businesses as well. Where the standard features are not enough, it offers third-party extensions to expand the already feature rich platform, and Magento’s modular architecture allows skilled developers to extend and customize the platform to the business’s needs.

As Magento is currently the most powerful and popular e-commerce platform and is still growing and being developed according to the best industry standards, as well as having a growing third-party extension market, we can be certain to have a secure, up to date and well-supported platform for years or even decades to come.

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So you’ve decided to start an e-commerce web site. Congratulations! There has never been a better time than now to start an e-commerce web site. To the average business person, starting an e-commerce site is a daunting task. The purpose of this article is to point you in the right direction and inform you of some of your options.

The first step in creating your e-commerce site is to decide how to create your site. Since e-commerce has exploded over the last few years, there are more design options. The “easier” option is to use an all in one package from one of the larger hosting companies. Another option is to use an e-commerce system like osCommerce or X-Cart. Finally, another option is you can have a web developer design a custom site for you. Now let’s take a look at these options.

All in One Packages

Are you new to the internet? This could possibly be the best option for you. Hosting companies such as GoDaddy, Yahoo, 1and1, and Homestead have created plans where you can setup e-commerce sites yourself using a sitebuilder. Instead of paying a large price for your site, you pay a monthly cost to cover hosting. For about $10 a month, you can have an e-commerce site.

E-Commerce Systems

Do you have a little experience with designing web sites? Then you can use an e-commerce system for your site. Systems such as osCommerce and X-Cart are full-functioning e-commerce solutions that make doing business easy. All you have to do is buy the hosting, install the software, and personalize the system. Although that is easier said than done, it is still a low cost solution.

Custom Design

If you’re looking for a specific type of e-commerce system or want a truly unique site, you can hire a web development company to design your site. While this is the more expensive option, you get what you pay for. If you choose the right company, you’ll get a designed to order e-commerce system and some search engine optimization. They can also provide information about online marketing and how to make your site successful.

Starting an e-commerce site is by no means an easy task, but it is a great idea. If done correctly, you can take your business to customers in different states, countries, or even continents! The door is in front of you, all you have to do is knock. Good luck with your online venture!

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Eric Friese owns custom-ecommerce.com [http://www.custom-ecommerce.com] and is President of Tiger Web Solutions [http://www.tigerwebsolutions.com]. Eric Friese has been in the web development industry for 10 years. Eric can be reached through the Tiger Web Solutions web site.

The difference being alluded to in this article strictly deals with the fundamentally basic way e-commerce women prefer to network and build up their e-commerce business. The writer’s personal opinion is that e-commerce men have the tendency to “go it alone” and tend to hold on to information they obtain a little more tightly that e-commerce women, who enjoy the company of their peers and thrive on information that is shared with them. One area that many e-commerce women are having difficulty with in their online business is finding ways to get traffic to their websites. There is a lot of great information out there on the subject of search engine optimization. Most of the information delves in just one area at a time, however. There are articles on proper keywords, link exchanges, etc, but few that have it all together. Now, both e-commerce men and women would like all the information laid out for them, and if possible, all steps of optimization basically done for them. And, there is a program that, while it doesn’t do all the work for someone, does make it extremely easy.

The plus for e-commerce women is that the program includes not only the tools to increase traffic to their site; it includes a “club” or “haven” specific to e-commerce women.

Now there is a SEO software process that will allow women to answer a few questions and follow an eight-step procedure. Once completed, the software submits the website to the top search engines, like Google and Yahoo, increasing the visibility to potential visitors looking for a particular service or product. It is that simple!

This program will include tips and training tools for search engine optimization, as well as banner exchanges and link exchanges between members, forums for networking, and a conference room where members will be allowed to hold their own individual presentations.

Once a member of this elite e-commerce women’s club, there is the bonus opportunity of making extra income, whether a member needs it or not, (just kidding), because members automatically become affiliates. Obviously, for the pioneer members of this club, the opportunity for a large increase in income is a reality.

Hopefully, there will be more e-commerce clubs that will offer SEO tools, along with the networking opportunities that many organizations for women do already have. Smart e-commerce women do know how important it is to be less competitive with their peers, and more giving in the information that has been learned, through networking, as well as through valuable experience. This writer believes that e-commerce women working together in a “club-like” environment is not only the key to success, but a powerful key to success.

Debbie Barth’s professional background has mostly been in the administrative field. Debbie had the wonderful experience of living in Helsingborg Sweden for five years. She taught American English at Fokuniversitetet, Helsingborg, an extension of Lund University . Upon coming to the United States, she was employed by a large company in Georgia as a project analyst, responsible for software conversions with major banking institutes. She is currently an executive assistant for the CEO of an insurance company in Greensboro , North Carolina . She is the founder of NC Women’s Network, and Network Shopping, as well as a publisher in Quikonnex. She is a member of Women’s E-Commerce Association, International (WECAI). Debbie is also a member of Traffic Tsunami. You can contact Debbie at admin@ncwomensnetwork.com, or toll-free 888-238-1314