Choosing The Best Online Store Software

If you’ve been online for some time you’ve no doubt heard of the free osCommerce (the leading Open Source online shop e-commerce solution that is powered by a dedicated, strong, and ever growing community) and like other popular open source solutions they have a thriving community of developers/businesses that take the open source software and build superior solutions from it and try to profit from that effort.

One such solution is CRE Loaded. CRE Loaded offers an open source version tht you can use to build small stores and then when you need a more robust solution they steer you into their “Pro” version. That’s the version I chose to use for my first online store, Big City Pet, an online pet store. I chose this solution after soliciting feedback from some online retail pros and the fact that you pay them one time for the solution and never any monthly fees or transaction fees like some of the other options available out there.

After getting started on building out my first online store it became apparent that I was going to need their Store Manager for CRE Loaded to speed up and simplify the process of starting and later maintaining Big City Pet.

Store Manager for CRELoaded is a Windows application that allows you to manage your CRE Loaded-based online store much more efficiently. You can add, delete and update products, categories and manufacturers, automatically upload your product images while editing products, categories, manufacturers, view reports, orders and keep the track of your online sales. All this from your computer. CRE Loaded Manager was made for ordinary entrepreneurs not geeks, and after only a few settings required for the program to start and it just works.

I’ll report back when my store is live, but so far it seems to be working great! They offer a free 30-day trial period if you want to check it out yourself. Free Store Manager trial

Online Sales Surge 26% on Cyber Monday

“Cyber Monday” (the first Monday after Thanksgiving) was a success for retailers on two fronts: traffic and sales, according to two Internet industry analyst reports. Traffic on retail sites rose 26% on Cyber Monday compared to the same day last year, Web site metrics company Hitwise found in its survey, while comScore reported that Cyber Monday sales reached $733 million this year. The day is referred to as Cyber Monday because of a sharp increase in online shopping that day.

What this means for traditional brick and mortar stores long term is not clear, but for online retailers it’s very good news. The more people order online and have good experiences the more likely they will be to continue moving all of the purchases online. This will continue to present new opportunities to current dot com businesses and entrepreneurs of tomorrow.

dot com on…