Electronic commerce, commonly known as eCommerce, consists of buying and selling products or services over electronic systems such as the internet or other computer networking systems, and it has many advantages over “traditional shopping” for both consumers and businesses. With e-commerce, The Flower Shop business will flourish with being enabled to stay open all the time and expand customer and geographical reach. Furthermore, eCommerce can potentially reduce costs, and it allows for niche targeting. Three eCommerce platforms that would best suit The Flower Shop and its business goals: Zen Cart, Magento, and osCommerce.
Zen Cart is designed to make online shopping simple for customers and easy for business owners to manage. It is an open source eCommerce shopping program that was built on a foundation of osCommerce, and it provides an easy-to-setup and run online store, and it offers easy administration/product management with working credit card processing out of the box. The program has newsletter and product notification systems to keep customers up to date with product development or business coupons. Furthermore, the Zen Cart program offers an easy upgrade process when it is necessary. One of the major advantages of Zen Cart is that it is free to download. A disadvantage of this system, however, is that time and some technological expertise is required to manage it. In addition, though the download of the product is free, personal hosting and SSL certificate come with a cost. Overall, however, Zen Cart is an efficient and versatile eCommerse platform.
Magento is a feature-rich open source eCommerce application. It provides online merchants with unprecedented flexibility and control over the look, content, and functionality of their eCommerce store. This software is designed to satisfy the customer and consequently maintain a steady flow of eCommerce business. One main advantage of this system is that Magento is mobile commerce and iPhone optimized. It also offers easy to manage marketing promotion tools to enhance business profit and customer satisfaction. Some of these tools include coupons, promotional pricing, and multi-tier pricing. A disadvantage of Magento is that the download, though free, takes up 8.9MB of computer space, almost twice that of Zen Cart. Furthermore, it requires specially configured and high-power hosting.
osCommerce is an eCommerce and online store management system that offers a wide range of out-of-the-box features and enables online stores to be set up fairly quickly with minimal effort. osCommerce provides a catalog frontend and an administrative tool backend which can be easily installed and configured over a web-based installation process. The software is free to download and takes up only 2.2MB of computer space. Advantageous features of osCommerce include automatic web-based installation, unlimited number of products and categories, automatic set-up of eCommerce payment systems, support for dynamic images, printable invoices and packing lists, temporary and permanent shopping carts, and real time shipping quote integration with UPS, USPS, FedEx, etcetera. Disadvantages of this software include no inbuilt way to password protect the administrative area of osCommerce, the program itself is not template driven, customization without a developer may be slow, and it has a limited attribute system.
Although all three of these eCommerce platforms would be appropriate for The Flower Shop to use, osCommerce would be the best program to choose because it is so simple to use and very customer friendly. osCommerce is well-known and widely used. It has a large support community and a long history behind it. It is cost effective. The open source software is free to download and use, and existing code/contributions are also free. Most importantly, osCommerce is easy for the customer to use. The software features a familiar shopping cart model, with a number of ways to access the product catalog. It is a customer focused program because it is easy to use and provides extras such as reviews, newsletters, and email notifications about products. The system is also easy for the administrator to control and manage. osCommerce is customizable and expandable. Consequently, as the business of The Flower Shop expands, it will be simple to add new products or product categories to the catalog. Though customization of the site may be more difficult with osCommerce than with other products, one can obtain basic knowledge about the program and the technology in order to more easily manage the site. These skills are easy to learn if someone has the motivation to learn them. osCommerce, unlike Magento or Zen cart, has a large support community and is widely used. This is because business owners trust the program and are confident in its efficiency. Overall, osCommerce is an online-store management platform that would be perfect to employ as The Flower Shop obtains online business.
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