To choose and run an e-commerce website a powerful shopping cart program is very much important to the success of your online business. Shopping Cart plays a very significant role in managing an online store. There are many different kinds of online store management software programs available on the market today.

OsCommerce which is also known as Open Source e-Commerce Solution is one of the most commonly and widely used online shopping cart programs to manage online store or ecommerce site. The osCommerce application can be easily installed through Fantastico in your cPanel control panel. It can be integrate with any web server having PHP and MySQL installed.

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Everyone can name some of the most common marketing tools, but how to define marketing tools for online shops? Itís not quite as simple as saying email, which seems to be the favorite form of spammers. Flyers, ads, and billboards are obvious definitions of offline marketing tools, but letís take a look at some of their online equivalents.

Email is actually a marketing tool that can be useful as long as you donít overdo it. Donít spam anyone who hasnít asked for information from your business, especially with a mass mailer that goes out every week. What is acceptable is to create a mailing list that your customers can opt to join and have the option of leaving at any time.

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It is no secret that the web base commerce has been heavily affected by online scams, with a special importance on what is called identity theft, we all hear lately on massive credit card data being stolen by hackers all over the place, and certainly such tendency can come to your business as a fraudulent customer or as a security breach into your hosting servers.
Credit Card companies have set a certain bunch of guidelines to help keep your business protected, this is of course not a 100% full proof system but helps your business to meet the criteria and become less liable to lawsuits. There are different levels according to your business activity in reference of amount of customers. Following a few of procedures you need to keep in order to be a compliant and secure merchant account.
Always gather sensitive information such as: names, last names, emails, address; under a unique session, most common protocol known as SSL. Make sure credit card information is also secluded by and SSL. This Method will guaranty that only that one the single user will have access to the inputted data, leaving out spywares and other uninvited watchers from this session.
Certify not to storage any credit card information, especially if your hosting is not a dedicated server or owned by your company, if this is the case make sure you have periodical scrubs to spot hacks into your system, and also comply with The PCI regulation. Moreover credit card information should be encrypted and make sure only dedicated reliable workers will have access to this information. Take notice that most internet services payments providers will reply with enough information to pin point any transaction, including payments from recurring transactions if your business follows such a model.
Always a great idea to have 3DSecure and Verify by Visa confirmation embedded to your system, this function expects from a costumer to input a unique pin number supplied by its issuing bank, this pin is to be inputted into the costumer’s bank corroboration page. Most processors will offer this system with your merchant account, and both Visa and MasterCard are enthusiastically promoting the use of this protocol to prevent unnecessary fraud.
Many internet risk tools are also open for your business in order to assess the risk factors of the transaction, yet now days these programs although provide a great service are found scarce. You can apply what is called a two step charge, the original transaction is send to your payment provider with a simple command of pre-authorization, the provider will apply online risk tools and will announce the card holder of a future payment to your company; usually this announcement will stay active for 7 days, within that period of time, you can apply you know your costumer procedures for instance: verify phone, address, email, etc. After that a simple charge command is implemented without the need of credit card storage. For merchants selling tangible goods is a good idea to have a professional delivery service that provides tracking numbers.

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It has been proven that consumers who buy stuff on the internet through stores that are available via websites, usually stick to one and only one e-store even if a specific consumer has only been able to buy only once in such an e-store, and that experience has been proven to be satisfactory.

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