Late last year Viart developed their shopping cart software to provide users with the ability to add an affiliate program to their shopping cart.  Like all affiliate programs, the affiliate module allows you to promote your web business in which an affiliate (publisher) is rewarded for every visitor, subscriber, customer, and/or sale provided through his/her efforts.

The affiliate module developed by Viart has been integrated into the complete range of viart shopping cart solutions, and offers many unique features.  Full details about the viart affiliate module can be found here.

People can assess the shopping cart software by taking advantage of the current fully hosted 30 day trial on offer: Hosted shopping cart trial

Google, Ask and Yahoo have together announced the launch of Sitemaps ‘Autodiscovery’.  This enables webmasters to simply specify the location of their sitemap within the robots.txt file and universally submit their content to the search engines.

A sitemap is basically a  one-stop-shop for search engines when it comes to indexing your website.  The new sitemaps model ‘autodiscovery’ is therefore ideal for webmasters, search engines and searchers alike:

• “Webmasters save time with the ability to universally submit their content to the search engines and benefit from reduced unnecessary traffic by the crawlers.”
• “The search engines get information with regards to pages to index as well as metadata with clues about which pages are newly updated and which pages are identified as the most important.”
• “Searchers benefit from improved search experience with better comprehensiveness and freshness.” Says Ask.com

According to this article by Anne Holand from Marketing Sherpa, a huge 82% of shoppers will not browse your homepage.  No matter how enticing a website may appear, they will head straight for navigational elements such as nav bars and search boxes.

The article presents the results of this study and depicts the majority of shoppers as “male shoppers in the real world”.

“You know how men are… they treat going to most stores as a Prcurement Expedition .  They enter with their shopping goal firmly in mind, glance about quickly to establish which aisle the item is in march down the aisle looking neither right nor left, grab the item in question and then march firmly to checkout and exit”.

In light of the study’s evidence, the article then goes onto say how webmasters can improve navigation, internal site search and a catagory pages’ conversion capability.

Today it has been announced that Google checkout is now available to all UK merchants and shoppers.

Google checkout is a checkout process that allows online merchants to process transactions online. The checkout enables customers to buy from online shops with Google Checkout integrated, quickly and securely.

If UK customers and merchants take advantage of Google Checkout as much as the US market have it’s sure to go down well!

BBC News reports Google will also offer £10 of free processing for every £1 spend on AdWords advertising!

I’m continually bumping into really interesting articles i’d like to share with you, and this one over at Stephen Spencer’s blog is one of them.

It’s a great post about why incorporating a forum into an eccomerce website can be great for customer interaction and also search engine rankings. Online integrated forums can generate lots of individual pages on a website - each post becoming a keyword-rich, fresh page that ends up in google, MSN, Yahoo etc. If a forum is set up correctly for SEO, an active forum can capture a lot of traffic mainly because of the various related key terms being used by users on such a regular basis.  Forums can be the beginning of a long tail search engine optimisation strategy.

When Internet shopping carts did not exist, an online customer would be able to to add just one product to their shopping cart at any one time, and checkout.  It was not possible to add multiple products to a shopping basket.  If ecommerce was to become the future, it was clear that merchants would have to provide a quicker and much more convenient service for customers.

Internet shopping carts has enabled ecommerce to become as big as it is today.  For a business to stay competative, it is no longer enough to have a website that merely displays what the highstreet shop sells, it seems that it must have a shopping basket where by customers can purchase directly from their computer.

Today shopping carts give customers a host of advantages:

1)  It allows customers to add as many products to their virtual shopping basket as they wish.

2)  View and delete individual products.

3)  Software today even allows shoppers to track their order all the way to their doorstep.

5)  Internet shopping carts with an integrated help desk support system provides shoppers with a form of customer support.  Shoppers can feel secure and happy that any potential problems will be resolved.

6)  Forums can become a widely used feature of a website so shopping cart software with integrated forums are especially handy features, this is more so the case if online retailers sell equipment users may need product support for.

Shopping cart software also gives merchants a host of advantages:

7)  Internet shopping carts with an integrated web content management system allows merchants to customise the content and design of their online ecommerce shopping cart and store.

8)  Web content management systems today often come with integrated search engine friendly features, providing merchants with the potential to rank well in the search engines for their desired key terms.

Above I have listed just 8 features available to merchants today.

Viart Shop has many more features, on top of those mentioned above, and continues to grow in functionality as the ecommerce industry develops.

About the Author

Viart (http://www.viart.com/) provide PHP shopping cart software worldwide.

The company are currently providing a fully hosted 30-day trial of their PHP Internet shopping carts

Viart.com (http://www.viart.com/), an online company supplying PHP shopping cart software and web content management software worldwide, offers people a fully hosted 30-day trial of their ViArt Shop and integrated CMS.

Viart has put in place a free 30-day trial of their products, giving people the opportunity to test out the shopping cart software and integrated web content management software without any commitment.  Since the shopping cart is fully hosted during the trial, it removes the issue of set up for users, giving users an opportunity to test out the shopping cart software without any hassle.

The shopping cart software with integrated web content management software has been designed with flexibility at its forefront.  First time shop owners can take advantage of the free-hosted trial and build websites that include shopping carts, forums, help desks and more, and the Viart technical support team will be on hand every step of the way.

For experienced users with PHP and HTML knowledge, the shopping cart software and integrated CMS offers all the functionality of an advanced scripting engine behind the scenes, with complete flexibility regarding design.

“Influenced by our ever-increasing customer base, the ViArt shopping cart and CMS continues to grow in functionality each and every month. Our most recent updates have included the integration of Google Checkout, the ability to integrate Google tracking into an online shop and a call centre module.  We have aimed to create a shopping cart system capable of performing all the functions required to run an online business.  We want people to sample our scalable range of shopping cart solutions that can come complete with an integrated help desk support system and an integrated forum” Explains Mr. Birzul, Technical Director at Viart.

The fully featured hosted trial of the shopping cart software offers people the chance to assess the viart shop without any installation or commitment.  Visit http://www.viart.com/hosting_trial.php for more information.

About the Company
ViArt was established in 1999 and operate from purpose built premises based in North Yorkshire.  The company’s in-house team of e-commerce software developers whom have over thirty years experience in this arena designed the ViArt suite of products.

ViArt.com, PHP shopping cart software provider, offers users the ability to integrate Google Checkout into their shopping carts.

12 March 2007 - ViArt (http://www.viart.com) has developed their PHP shopping cart software to provide users with the ability to integrate Google Checkout into their ecommerce website.

Google checkout allows online merchants to process transactions online.  The checkout enables customers to buy from Viart shopping cart merchants quickly and securely using one single username and password. A fast, secure checkout process helps to persuade shoppers to buy online and buy more often.

To find out more about this latest update to the Viart PHP shopping cart software take a look at the full press release: Viart PHP Shopping Cart Software Integrates Google Checkout.

Viart are currently offering a fully hosted 30-day trial of their shopping cart software and integrated web content management software from: http://www.viart.com/hosting_trial.php

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