Estimating shipping rates can be a long and intimidating process as you attempt to make sure every shipping possibility is covered. By far the best thing to do in my opinion is to call official shipping rates from the actual companies themselves. Magento has this feature built in, so why not use it if it’s there?

Flat rates, and even worse, table rates leave you open to the fluctuations in actual rates of shipping as they changed based on inflation and other economic movements. It’s not something you want to be caught out on. In addition to the static options like flat or table rates, Magento also offers dynamic retrieval of rates from various products, such as UPS, USPS, FedEx, DHL and more.

There’s a special extension that allows seamless integration of the Royal Mail module that does the same thing. It’s free to install so you might aswell give it a go. If you want to add a little extra for handling and packaging you are also free to do so – just add it into the backend and it will be integrated. It doesn’t appear in the site frontend either.

For a while now, ecommerce has moved further and further towards marketplace sites, where it’s not just the website selling goods to users, but users selling goods to users through the website. The most well known example of an online marketplace is Ebay, where transactions are purely user to user. Sites such as Amazon and Play.com evolved from being purely business to consumer ecommerce sites, due to the growing popularity of user interaction boosted by the Web 2.0 revolution.

It opens up a whole new way to shop online for users because they’re able tobuy items that are not necessarily available in the main store, or there’s the possibility that used items for sale will be available at a lower price. Does this effect the sales of the website’s normal catalog? Possibly, but I think the advantages that user to user selling brings outweighs any potential sales reductions:

• Users need to sign up on the site in order to sell resulting in more user accounts and more opportunity to market new products to them with the data acquired.
• A small percentage of the sale goes to the store anyway. With no other major operating costs other than the space required on the server to advertise the products – it’s a virtually free source of revenue.
• Greater interactivity and more ways to buy will also attract more casual visitors to the site.

There are currently no commercial shopping carts that I am aware of that have this function available to users. It’s likely that startups will not find much success from this type of selling anyway. It seems only trusted and well known brands are able to generate enough users to make it work. In which case, it’s probably unlikely that we’ll see these types of shops making huge successes of themselves with small companies in the short-term, but certainly time will tell.

With a brand new design, e-commercewebdesign.co.uk has relaunched for the third time in an effort to further cement itself as the UK’s top e-commerce web design company. The new design is more in line with other sites owned by the Crear Group, promoting clean, detailed design with usability.

An update to our e-commerce portfolio, as well as a look at our brand new e-commerce packages means that there’s plenty of information about our services available for potential clients to read about.

The new site is currently in its early stages. We will be also using this site to showcase how we are using video, JQuery and a host of other web applications to push ecommerce further than it has ever previously gone.

The last couple of weeks I have been building an e-commerce website using open source software Magento. The most important factor about Magento is the ability to change absolutely anything in the code to suit your own requirements meaning anything is possible.

The one problem with this is the well-known steep learning curve that comes along with the software where even the simplest of tasks become hours worth of online investigation. The lack of one-to-one support results in the scouring of forums, chat rooms and blog posts until you find your answer, which when people have their own problems to deal with, can mean that help is not top of anyone’s priority.

However, as with any new technologies if you persevere with it you will doubtless reap the rewards. Having come to the end of my first Magento endeavour and having learned some important lessons from the process it is clear to see that this is the way forward. As OS becomes more and more accepted as the standard for Web 2.0 technologies, it’s hard to see anyone reverting back to un-evolving software.

For pretty much any e-commerce web design company setting up a new shop, the inclusion of PayPal is now considered highly important. PayPal was formed in March 2000 and has since achieved hug commercial success, largely attributed to its co-operation with eBay, which bought the firm in 2002. The UK alone is responsible for 20 million accounts. The reason for this substantial growth is largely down to it being the first to get there. By offering skeptical Internet users the opportunity to refrain from entering their credit card details on every site they wish to purchase from, they had provided a simple and safe payment system for anyone to use – and this resulted in a internationally-known, reliable brand.

However PayPal hasn’t been without it’s critics. There’s no doubting people’s disappointment with the charges made to the users when transactions are made, meaning sellers are not receiving the full amount for their sales. Users of PayPal are also the victims of unprecedented levels of phishing which have already cost unknowing users huge amounts of money. PayPal’s support system has also been largely criticized as their customer helpline is often very unresponsive, not to mention the unpredicatble freezing of accounts with no prior warning.

PayPal still seems like the most secure payment method available and I would urge all e-commerce sites to have it as an option alongside standard credit card transactions.