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When you use a Template or Theme-based storefront,
you cannot build your website just Anyway or Anywhere
Your
website is permantly
fused to your
webstore !
What are Templates?
In order to keep traditional ecommerce storefronts PCI complaint, while still providing merchants with some kind of flexibility in design, most ecommerce solutions evolved the concept of a template or theme-based storefront for your website/store combination. They sound elegant and easy, but the problems with forcing you to use templates in these kinds of shopping carts are numerous:
- Your website design will be permantly connected to
their storefront template.
In some cases they may even charge extra for the template you
want.
- This is despite the fact that there are thousands and thousands of free website templates and themes already available on the Internet that are also available for free.
- Adopting their storefront to use those free templates would require an enormous effort or expense.
- Adopting our storefront to use those free templates is trivial.
- Most updates or upgrades from a traditional ecommerce vendor will require you to completely redesign your website or start over to make use of the "new" template features, or you will need to hire a programmer to encorporate the new template changes back into your web site.
- Future changes to your web site design or your business will typically require you to hire a programmer to modify the template. These costs will add up.
- If you already have an existing website where you just need to add a store, you may have to toss most of the previous work you already did--away, and start completely over with their template. This is true even if you are perfectly happy with the website you already have and are just trying to add the storefront to it.
- Traditional ecommerce carts are more expensive because your website and hosting solution must ALL have PCI wrapped into it and you will have to typically pay PCI hosting scan fees on top of higher PCI costs related to PCI audits across the whole hosting facility to truely stay PCI compliant.
- Even worse, nowadays, some new shopping cart solutions, in order to reduce prices, are simply ignoring PCI altogether leaving you out of compliance. In some cases, they provide a PayPal-only solution that only solves the PCI problem temporarily. This gives you no way to scale your business easily later on when it grows and those PayPals fees become much more expensive than a real merchant account solution. When you do later grow and need to add credit card capability, you suddenly discover the solution can never be PCI compliant or have to pay many additional PCI related fees. At that point, the only thing you can do is start completely over again because your website and webstore are one combined entity, or basically, a modified template.
Complex Ecommerce
Traditional ecommerce solutions have generally evolved from stand alone software where the merchant integrated the web store into the website, to now, elaborate services that combine website, store and hosting all together. We know this because we use to sell both types of solutions ourselves. The basic problem with earlier stand-alone software is maintaining PCI compliance at the merchant level, a set of complicated and expensive standards that require the business, the hosting, and the software you use to go through expensive quarterly or yearly audits by a third party if a merchant's store collects, transmits or stores cardholder data. With a stand-alone solution, the merchant owns all of the PCI compliance headache which really make these solutions impractical and insecure today. Along came the website/store/hosting ecommerce solutions that bundled all that together. Using so-called templates or themes, they attempt to simplify PCI for the merchant. However, the basic problems with the elaborate all encompassing solutions are that you are stuck with a single vendor and the shopping cart/store/hosting vendor still incures PCI audit costs that have to be passed on to the merchant. So the all encompassing solution for the merchant is more expensive, more complicated, less flexible, and more time consuming.
Until Now...
Ecommerce made Easy
SalesCart Cloud is a cloud-based online store only. It decouples your online store from your website and it decouples your online store from your web hosting. It is able to do this by revolutionizing the traditional security model for ecommerce. It doesn't try to be your web site or your web hosting! After all, you can build and host websites for litterally pennies per year, or in some cases now, for free - right? It doesn't need templates because the functionality people want from an online store, unlike their website, is mostly the same: Allow for easy product searchs, allow products to be categorized, so selection and finding products is simplier, display the products along with elements about those products that will encourage sales and inform their customers, take the customers order, take the customers information relative to product delivery and options, securely charge the customer for the order and taxes if they apply, and notify the customer and the merchant of the order. Because there are no templates and because your website, web hosting, and webstore are not all fused together, SalesCart achieves many benefits and features:
Benefits
- You can build your website anyway you want, host it anywhere you want. SalesCart works with the entire range of web site building tools from: free website builders (provided by most hosting companies); free templates provided all over the Internet; or blog-based website builders -- all the way to: fancy web site design tools; elaborate content management systems (CMS); or even hand coded websites. SalesCart don't care how you build your website, how you host it, or where you host it. Your website is simply the frame for your marketing and sales pitch and your online store just plugs into that frame. This literally allows you 100% flexibility in customizing your website and website marketing for your customer instead of the cart solution dictating that for you.
- You don't even need a website - at all. There are plenty of businesses that don't need a website because they are doing "word-of-mouth" advertising or their businesses are 100% social based. However, many of these business still want to take online sales. This is especially true with the advent of mobile apps where a traditional website may not be needed to market to your customers. SalesCart works if you are doing mobile-only marketing, social-only marketing, or even business-card only marketing, and even in cases where all you want is an online store to take orders, preorders, reservations, or delivery orders.
- Seamless store updates/upgrades without redesign. Since your website design is no longer coupled to your online store. We can make automatic upgrades to your online store to give you new features and capabilities and you don't have to redesign your website to take advantage of those features.
- Updates to your web site design or your business marketing simplified. Now, you can completely redesign your website or move your web hosting, and you won't need a programmer to encorporate the store into your new design and marketing, and you won't need a new costly modified store template either.
- Can be used for reservations, delivery orders, pre-orders, or even free item distribution. If you have a restaurant or bar, you may just need a reservation, pre-order, or delivery order. You can easily customize your products and checkout simply to collect information about a "multiple" item product or service even if you are not accepting payments.
- Can be more easily integrated into an existing website, no special programming language or special html code to learn. Some stores have evolved complicated programming languages (API's) to manipulate their store templates. Learning a whole new computer language to design or change your web store is complicated and expensive.
- Can be mirrored on more than one website or franchised. The key to exponential growth in many small businesses is franchisement. With SalesCart, you can integrate your same web store into hundreds of different websites, or resellers and allow each of them to maintain their own look and feel or specific web site marketing presentation independently. You keep track of the products and pricing.
- Simplier to use and maintain. This is because you can maintain your website independently from your webstore the same way a brick and mortar business maintains their window displays, advertising/marketing, and product aisles independently from their cash registers and checkout lanes.
- Choose from 1000's of free templates throughout the web. You don't need to use a special online store template. With SalesCart, you can use any web site template, so choose from 1000's of free web templates available on the web. Heres just a few to choose from: http://www.freewebsitetemplates.com/, http://www.oswd.org/, http://www.templatemonster.com/website-templates.php, http://www.wix.com/website/templates, or http://www.freewebtemplates.com/
Social Ecommerce
Unlike many of the pretend Facebook stores coming along, SalesCart is a real Facebook app. However, just because SalesCart is a real Facebook app that doesn't mean you have to sell on FaceBook. SalesCart uses Facebook as the container to build, maintain, and display your web store. It essentially gives you a way to sell, without a website, using a Facebook container to hold your website for the purposes of marketing to your customers. You can use Facebook as the container, your website as the container, or a mobile app as the container - it doesn't matter.
- SalesCart is a real Facebook app not a link back display of an existing website so when your customer checks out, they don't have to click back to your website leaving Facebook. When your customer checks out with SalesCart, the customer securely stays on Facebook the entire process and doesn't link back to a website checkout
- Sell without a website. With a pretend Facebook Store, you still have a complicated and expensive website to maintain PCI complaince on whether you need it or not. With SalesCart, you can sell just using your facebook store only or a stand-alone store displaying outside of Facebook. Also, if you are selling a word-of-mouth product or mobile app, you may have already decided and concluded you don't need a website. That is also 100% fine.
- Use social commerce without the "business feel" of a formal website. With SalesCart, your website displays the Facebook store instead of Facebook displaying the website store....there is a huge different. In social selling, your approach must be subtle to be effective and more of a service to your customers rather than an outright in your face sales pitch than a traditional website's typically pitch.
- Social web store products can be mirrored to a regular website. Despite SalesCart not requiring a website, you can still mirror the SalesCart store to your website like a traditional ecommerce storefront.
- Social web store products can be mirrored to other communities. In fact, you can mirror your SalesCart store all over the place and display and sell your items on other communities as well like eBay, Amazon, or Etsy and use SalesCart as your central location to hold your product details where you can link out individual items or your whole store. You can't really do this with a traditional web store. In a traditional web site all the other marketing elements of your website are needed to make it work. However, when you are using a distribution channel they are already providing you with their own front end marketing.
Flexibility
Social commerce is much more than Facebook alone nowadays including Twitter, mobile and who knows what is coming next
- SalesCart will work in any Internet container that has basic html access of about 380 characters and we are trying to reduce even that number. So whatever comes next on the horizon, your SalesCart online store is already prepared for it.
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