Weaving Culture Into e-Commerce Written by Gary Hyman
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I thought it may be helpful to take a look at product from a very high level... It’s a website development tool that automates creation of complex websites. ShopFactory has a lot in common with Microsoft FrontPage, because ShopFactory never requires you to program HTML code. However, experts do have option of customizing appearance with manual HTML entry. ShopFactory also supports templates that change colors and appearance of your entire website with a couple mouse clicks. Finally ShopFactory manages toolbars for navigation throughout your website. Despite high-level similarities with Microsoft FrontPage, ShopFactory is a very different tool. Whereas FrontPage is designed to handle generic websites, ShopFactory is specifically designed to build shopping carts. Therefore ShopFactory automatically manages functions that are required for shopping carts. Some examples are a privacy policy, an introductory front page, departments, product pages, an item cart, checkout, shipping cost calculations, and payment handling. All of these functions are automated, so you and your staff can focus on describing your company and your products without getting tied down in technical details. The Website Wizard ****************** After running ShopFactory for first time, program presents you with Website Startup Wizard designed to step you through process of setting up your first site. First Wizard asks you about introductory (index.html) page, with fields for Title, Introduction, Description, and Logo Image. All fields are optional, and difference between Introduction and Description are position on page and size of font used. The next step of Wizard asks for theme of website. Themes are a preconfigured settings for overall look and feel of website, including fonts, colors, graphics used to spice up site, location of navigation bar and title, location of “Add to Cart” button relative to items, and other settings. In demo version of software there are already 33 different themes, plus several color options within each theme. The themes are also customizable, allowing you to start with a default theme and modify it to your requirements. It is important to emphasize that theme settings span all pages of your site, for a consistent look and feel throughout site. Once you select theme of site, Wizard asks you for contact information for company. This information is automatically inserted into relevant pages of site, such as About Us page. Next in Wizard is Classification page, which lets you select up to 15 categories for your site, Such as Beverages (Alcoholic, Coffee and Tea), or Children (Baby, Gifts), etc. These categories are used to list your site on company’s portal mall. The final step of Wizard presents you with various Optional Settings buttons. We will discuss these, along with some advanced features of ShopFactory in another article. Lastly you press “Finish” in Wizard, which will leave you at main window of ShopFactory. Here all of various components of your website are listed in left panel, where they can be easily edited or modified. From here you should save your website, and you also have option of previewing website in a web browser. It is important to remember that all settings configured by wizard can be edited or modified later via several properties panels. The wizard provides a mechanism to get a basic website working very quickly. As you are stepping through Wizard don't spend too much time deliberating various details, because they are very easy to preview and change later. A demo version of ShopFactory is available at: http://www.shopfactory.com/index.html Last Words ********** As you can see language presentation is an extremely important component to be successful in International e-Commerce Market. Hopefully these two shopping cart solutions will help with your e-Commerce initiative. They are proven and tested to work in International e-Commerce arena.
Author: Gary Hyman has lived and worked Internationally over the last 20 years. He is a well known e-Commerce consultant, assisting organizations to expand their e-Business globally. He can be reached at info@ecommercegrowth.com. The e-Commerce Growth Group at http://www.ecommercegrowth.com/.
| | Keep your business computer trouble free.Written by John Watson
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Danny comments: “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.” When you upgrade, file formats are sometimes different from earlier versions of software. This means you cannot go back to earlier versions because they don’t recognise new file format. Do not assume that newer versions are better than earlier versions. All you have done is make software producer richer! Have a firewall and virus checker and keep them up to date Back up your data. 90% of companies who have a catastrophic data loss go bankrupt within two years. You should have two copies of important data and three copies of critical data stored in three different locations. One copy should be in a fire safe off site. This should be standard practice. You cannot trust computers. Sooner or later they will get you! If you don’t back up, you are an idiot and deserve all you get! Today I received this message from an ezine owner: A lot of you sent me an ad this week, which I had saved on my hard drive and guess what? My computer crashed and I lost every one. I have a backup computer, but no ads. Please re-send your ads so I can get them in Friday edition. Sorry for trouble. The ezine owner is obviously a nice person but he may lose customers who haven’t got time to resend their ads. No one likes to repeat their efforts. Maybe his computer crashed because he had broken not only back up rule but some of other rules. As a general principle, use your machine and don’t tinker with it. Once it is working, leave it alone! Leave it alone!!!
John Watson is an info publisher on the internet and a martial arts school owner. He taught Religious Studies and Life Skills to teenagers in London schools for about 33 years before retiring in 2000 A.D. His own e-books and those of the English multimillionaire, Stuart Goldsmith, can be found on his site at www.motivationtoday.com
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