Indian E-Commerce market is predicted to be one of the strongest economy according to the recent industry report, ‘E-commerce: A boon for the current economic downturn‘. “By the end of 2011, the e-commerce market in India had clocked close to Rs 50,000 cores.” it says. The current e-commerce market in India is around US$ 10 billion and has the potential to grow between $125 billion – $260 billion by 2024-25.

It proclaims, ” Today, consumers across urban India are confident enough to make purchases that exceed Rs 20,000 – 25,000 up from Rs 2,000 – 5,000 range in the recent past”. According to the report, “it estimates business-to-consumer (B2C) e-commerce, including both retail e-commerce and online travel
sales, will total to $18.7 billion in 2012, a growth of 21.9% over the previous year.”

The key reasons for the success of e-commerce are summarized below.
Shopping 24×7:
E-commerce open doors for shopping anytime where customers can make their shopping at ease anywhere and at any moment.

Reduced operational cost:
Online Business avail less infrastructural investment and associated labour costs which drives up the profit margin. In turn its benefited to the customers in the form of discounted pricing.

Easy to compare:
Easier and quicker to compare the prices of the goods online. One can explore products across global markets via e-commerce.

Safe & secure:
Online Payment method must be reputable and trustworthy. In India, all payment transaction providers are required to comply with the security requirements laid out by the Reserve Bank of India making the system more robust and reliable.

Increased reach for the merchant:
The customer finds the venture across geographic markets, the merchant too is able to display his product to customers in new territories that are now connected by the online network.

Social media trend:
With the growing support of Socialmedia the businesses have now begun to engage their customers by promotions, sales and new products are increasingly showcased through such channels and mobile apps.

These e-commerce developments may have been accelerated by the global economic downturn which may be driving consumers to find new ways of reducing their costs of living. The e-commerce landscape will continue to evolve rapidly as even more new start-ups are launched addressing existing and new market opportunities.

U.S. online retail sales are expecting E-commerce growth to reach $278.9 billion in 2015 after the increase from 12.6% to $176.2 billion in 2010. Internet connectivity via devices like smartphones, tablets and game consoles, new e-commerce models like flash sales (Gilt Groupe, Neiman Marcus Mid-Day Dash), daily deals, and digital downloads of media increased the rapid acceptance in recent years.

The online shoppers increased their online spending in traditional categories like books and media, less purchase of popular categories like furniture and home appliances driven E-commerce growth in 2010. About 5.5 million of consumers who shopped online for the first time drive growth to 30% in 2010

Forrester says, “E-commerce now makes up 8% of total retail sales — 11% if grocery sales are excluded from the equation.” In Europe, online sales grew by 18% in 2010 compared to 2009, and they are expected to grow 13% in 2011, Forrester stated in a separate report. Nearly 205 million of online buyers in Europe are expected to grow by 2015. Total sales are predicted to reach 133.6 billion euros.

Facebook, once only known for social gatherings and reconnecting with friends on the web, is beginning to look like a huge online marketplace and a great platform for building a brand and interacting customers. As e-commerce and online business swell to new heights, smart entrepreneurs are taking advantage of networking opportunities to help brand their business, build targeted traffic, and increase sales. There are a few different ways to use Facebook to make more revenue for your X-Cart store.

1. Deliver on the fundamentals of commerce. It is necessary to deliver on the basics,which are: product, price, in stock, fast checkout, and fast delivery to use Facebook
2. Facebook ads aren’t great. People using social networks don’t have purchasing intent. So Facebook ads might be great for brand advertising, but not for converting people into purchases.
3. You can do conventional marketing, but that’s not enough. Most X-Cart sites use their Facebook Pages for traditional marketing, like on sales and deals, pushing discounts to their fans. Another thought is to give your Facebook fans early access to new products. There’s nothing wrong with that and you can do it, but it’s not enough.
4. Engage your customers. Building a two-way communication and community becomes a reward for social media marketing, but it’s worth repeating and engage your customers. Talk to them. Get them to contribute. Respond to them. Pay attention.
5. Have great content – and the best content is user generated. Run an active program to encourage your customers to interact with you. Powerful content is great marketing, and the best content comes from your users through reviews. Encourage your customers to post reviews of your product, and highlight the best ones.
6. Integrate Facebook into your site.Unlike Facebook Page, integrate Facebook into your site also makes your customers more engaged and push out to their friends.That means Like buttons above the fold on each product, allowing people to connect with Facebook to post reviews.
7. Most important – experiment! This is very early days for Facebook commerce, so try things out! Don’t be afraid to try new things and see how it works.

Looking for a X-Cart Facebook Automation module for your X-Cart Website then you are in the right place. X-Cart Facebook Automation module helps you to promote your products, Increase Site Traffic,Rapidly Increase Niche Facebook fans, Automated facbook updates, Stay active in participation and Saves your time. For further informations feel free to contact us at sales @ mercuryminds.com.

E-commerce is the technical term for buying and selling products or services. E-commerce site can attract the visitors if it is able to cater to the requirements of the users in a convenient manner. For sites that exist primarily to sell products, it‘s very easy to look at sales and have a measuring stick to use when evaluating the success of the website. However, there are many number of factors that can influence the success of an e-commerce site, and identifying areas of strength and weakness is not always so simple. People do site promotion, SEO, affiliate marketing, and many other things but the goal is same to get clients and sell the products or services of the company.

1. Search Engine Optimization

• Search engines are much better at indexing static pages, and don’t do a good job of following hyperlinks that contain query strings. SEO friendly URLs help them to be indexed.
• Ability to add HTML titles and META tags, meta description and meta keywords for search engine optimization.
• Google sitemaps help webmasters to get their new stuff crawled by Googlebot faster than before.
• Auto-generated keyword-rich URLs based on product and category names

2. Site Management

• Administration permission roles and users
• Independent Systems develops sales tax calculation by state and zip code in designated states
• Automatic upgrades when hosted in data center
• Entries can be posted with an expiry date to display content that will automatically expire; ideal for mentioning sales and specials, etc. Advanced content management system for informational pages

3. Marketing Promotions and Tools

• Flexible price management with ability to restrict by product and price-level (retail, wholesale) : Percent discount, Fixed amount discount and Free shipping
  
• Entries can be sorted by Recent, Most Commented, Most Viewed.
• Multi-tier pricing for quantity discounts
• RSS feed allow users to subscribe to your content feeds.
• Support for multiple product feeds
• Send to a friend

4. Shopping cart

• Customer management
• Product management
• Variety of payment and shipping modules
• Order receipt emails
• Ability to use SSL secure layers for ordering process

5. Checkout

• SSL security
• Express/guest checkout
• Address book
• Automatically apply customer balance to order
• Sales tax by state, country, municipality based on zip code

6. Content Managed Pages

• Add unlimited pages to your website
• WYSIWYG product description tools
• Create unlimited web forms
• Customizable navigation
• Organize your pages into unlimited sections (categories)

7. Security

• PCI-DSS Compliant and CISP Certified Level 1
• Daily backups
• Multiple database version backups
• Fail over/cluster hardware firewalls
• Biometric access control to data center
• Free BSD operating system

8. Content Management (CMS) Components

• Add/edit/delete unlimited categories, products and information pages on your site.
• Dynamic categories
• Easy-to-use product navigation
• Product detail page
• Related items
• “Best Sellers” facility
• WYSIWYG content tools

9. Multi store:

• Manage more than one store for the same product, at different price, in different language, for different locations, and from same admin panel
• To deal with different products or different brands of a certain product
• Higher chances of giving customers what they are looking for.
• Gives you a lot of inbound links coming from your niche sites.

10. Reporting:

• Sophisticated ready-to-go reporting, no need to add any code to your web pages
• Track abandon rates and where customers abandon in online shop
• Tracking Sales, Payment, Shipping Options and discount Codes
• Report on Detailed visitors including new vs returning
• Products can be searched/filtered and added to the order.
• Currency can be selected per order.

A good e-commerce provider will be able to handle all of the back-end programming that you‘ll need to start selling online. The company you select should be able to help you organize your product catalog, provide a database of shipping information, and track customer orders. Do you need an online store that you can manage yourself? We can build your e-store and give you the best solutions to manage your Online E-commerce store. Our development staff will be happy to discuss custom development services at “sales @ mercuryminds.com” to meet your needs.

PowerReviews is the most widely deployed review platform in the world with an exclusive focus on retailers and brands. Recently Google announced the “Google Product Reviews Program,” which will begin featuring full-length product reviews and user ratings from participating retailers & manufacturers wherever it’ll help users with their shopping, including in Google search results & advertising programs. On Google Product Search, for e.g., we’ll feature your logo alongside representative reviews from your site, increasing brand exposure for your web store at a key point in the conversion process.

“PowerReviews,” a leading provider of customer reviews, as a partner to this program, to share premium user generated product review content from client sites. Ratings and review content will appear wherever it’s relevant for shoppers, including Google search results, Google Product Search, and Google advertising programs. PowerReviews social commerce solutions support more than 1000 retailers and brands on over 3,500 websites. In 2008, PowerReviews released In-line SEO™, which optimizes user-generated content for search and has been proven to significantly increase product page search traffic. Recognized as the customer reviews Solution Leader in the Internet Retailer Top 500 survey, PowerReviews works with over 1000 retailers and brands on over 3500 websites, including Staples, Drugstore.com, Gardener’s Supply, Diapers.com, Callaway and Jockey

Now, the company is extending its search suite by giving retailers the ability to automatically feed full-text product reviews to Google, increasing brand exposure for the retailer, while providing consumers with immediate access to opinions from other customers as they research and complete purchases. The study conducted by PowerReviews and the e-tailing group found that fifty percent of all overall shopping (in-store on the web) involves researching products online first. What’s more, the majority of shoppers (57%) begin research with a search engine. With this new offering, we continue to help retailers and brands leverage their product reviews by increasing traffic and exposure from Google.

Google Product Reviews helps retailers capture purchase-ready searchers at every stage of the shopping process and will be able to offer the full Google Product Reviews program to all of its clients, enabling retailers and manufacturers to attract more customers by leveraging reviews across all relevant Google properties. PowerReviews operates Buzzillions. Com, and works with over 1,000 retailers and brands on over 3,500 websites.

Want to implement PowerReviews at your Xcart or Magento store? Contact our sales team at sales@mercuryminds.com for more details.

Do you get doubtful while implementing CSS, Whether it is working correctly in various browsers?

Don’t worry! you can test CSS style attribute from the following site.

http://www.brunildo.org/test/

This site has lot of hints how to write CSS coding with various browser compatibility.

By Tech Fan

Solai Natarajan Kannan

We know that 36 percent of the scientists at NASA are now Indians, but did you know that India will become number 1 source of PHP developers soon. In a research report released by PHPClasses, number of PHP developers in India has been steadily increasing in the last few years.And soon we will replace the current United States as the main resource for the PHP development.

If we look at the figures regarding the users in PHPClasses site US-based developers stands at the top with 11.8% of the total number of users followed by INIDA with a percentage of 10.5% running behind in the race are Brazil and Germany with 5.22% and 4.66%.An interesting fact to note is that few years back USA ruled the charts with 20% of all users whereas INDIA account for only 3%.

When we look up at this drastic change it is not possible to locate at the exact reason why this happened.But the fact that the developing a site in INDIA is quite less than what the US and the European market charges can not be denied.If the growth remains in the same pace we will have lots of companies developing php based sites and products like X-cart, Magento, OSCommerce etc. However the report also states that the number of certified professionals in INDIA are very less compares to the US and European countries.