The following are 12 Reasons to use Magento:

• Multi-store management: The ability to control multiple websites and stores from one Administration Panel with the capability of sharing as much or as little information as needed.
• Administration permission system roles and users: Magento supports creating many admin users and can enable or disable specific sections for them(user roles).
• Orders can be viewed, created and edited from admin panel: Admin users can create new orders from the back end for any products and edit them.
• Email Notifications of Orders: Emails for new orders, shipments and invoices. Can generate each email template easily from the backend.
• Print invoices and packing slips: Invoices and packing slips can be created for specific orders as pdf files or can attach them to the order invoice or shipping mails.
• Google website optimizer integration for A/B: This helps website owners to improve conversion rates by conducting A/B testing and multivariate testing of their website content and layout.
• Search Engine Optimization: Magento is one of the most search engine friendly e-commerce platforms. It supports SEO in many ways like generating google site maps, search engine friendly urls, url rewrite, meta data for product and categories.
• Analytics and reporting: Magento integrates with google analytics and has an admin dashboard for report overview. It can also get the reports of sales, abandoned shopping cart reports, best view product reports, low stock reports, best purchased product reports, search terms reports, and total sales reports.
• Multi-Tier pricing for quantity discounts: Magento can specify separate prices for specific quantities of same product by customer groups.
• Marketing promotion: Magento has promotion tools like auto-generated site map, up-sells shopping cart, cross-sells on product pages, recently viewed products, compared items, send wish list to a friend by email or rss feed, and newsletter management.
• Catalog and shopping cart pricing rules: Can specify rules for discount rates, coupon codes to specific category groups, products or customer groups.
• One Page checkout: This greatly simplifies the checkout process, leading to an immediate increase in sales. Checking out is often the most complicated part of placing an order online and many users end up abandoning their order. Here all steps (logging/ register, shipping, payments) are in one page and easy to complete.

We have discussed many great reasons to use Magento for your next web store project. Magento has some wonderful features and is easy to use for both the customer and store owner. If you have any questions or would be interested in building your next website with Magento contact Utah web development company – iBCScorp .

“Let us tell your story and watch your company grow.” Sound Concepts is a marketing services company located in American Fork, Utah. They specialize in graphic design, writing/editing, photography, audio, video, and they also offer consultations in marketing. Sound Concepts has a vicissitude of tools to help grow your business. Some examples of their marketing tools include: magazines, newspaper articles, CD’s, DVD’s, brochure’s, books, distributer kits, and much more.

Because of the volume of work done by Sound Concepts, when it came time to upgrade those sites, they needed a large volume of web development work completed. iBCScorp is working with them to convert many e-commerce websites that were originally done in Microsoft .ASP over to Magento. iBCScorp also is working to improve the speed of their Print on Demand (POD) process, enabling the site to work quicker and more efficiently.

There are also some integration issues with the Microsoft SQL Server, and other back office processing systems.

iBCScorp is an established web development company located in St. George, Utah. For a free quote or consultation on your website(s), call 435-215-4674.

“Our crystal glass nail files are designed with you in mind and they are made to last a lifetime!” Deco Files is a company that sells customized crystal glass nail files. Other products that are sold by Deco Files include: file cases, gift baskets, ceramic heel files, buffers, cuticle nippers, compact mirrors, nail brushes, foot egg callus removers, and finger nail clippers.

iBCScorp did web development work for Deco Files by customizing their drop down list menus on their website. An OS Commerce Shopping Cart was also added to their site to enhance the company’s e-commerce capabilities.

iBCScorp is an Internet business consulting services company located in St. George, Utah. For questions regarding web development or search engine optimization, call 435-215-4674 to receive a free consultation.

Internet Business Consulting Services (ibcscorp) has been doing ongoing web development work for the site Together Forever International (togetherforeverint.com). Together Forever is a Russian and Ukrainian women connection service that wanted to add more up-to-date online dating tools to their site.

“Your best resource for thousands of Russian and Ukrainian women.” The site is the place to network and explore possible love connections with women from these specific countries. The site will provide current online dating tools such as: online chat, video chat, and the abilities to search through profiles.

iBCScorp created the site using Ruby on Rails. iBCScorp is currently rewriting the application to make video chat services available and also working to modify membership and subscription services through the site.  Administrators of the site will also be able to manage the text content on their own by using build in features from Refinery Content Management System (CMS).  RefineryCMS is a relatively new CMS system, giving leverage to the IBCSCorp developers making it easier and faster to add CMS features to a very complicated site.

For marketing and SEO purposes having a Content Management system that allows for the posting of articles and newsletters is vital.

iBCScorp is a web development company located in St. George, Utah with another office location in Sri Lanka. For a free consultation on your website, please call 435-215-4674 or the toll free number 1-877-778-7882.

Although we are located in Saint George Utah, daily we get calls about e-commerce from all over the country, Salt Lake City, New York,  Las Vegas, California to name a few.  When these calls come in, usually the client has a lot of ecommerce questions about what they need to do in order to sell things online.  As an internet consulting company, we like to provide the best advice and recommendations we possibly can.  The success of our customers is paramount.

Typically when a customer calls us about a new or existing e-commerce project, we have more questions for them than they have for us.  In this post I am going to try and go over some of these questions because they are things that anyone should think about when doing an e-commerce project.  It doesn’t matter what you are selling online, to be successful selling it you need to choose the right software to sell it.  There is no one size fits all solution, and careful thought should be put in to make sure you choose a solution that works for you long term, and helps your company be successful.

Often the customers calling us have a pre-determined notion of what they want because of some article they read or because of something a friend recommended.  We still want to verify that the platform they want to use is the right one for them.  Common platforms include Magento E-commerce, Joomla Virtue Mart, Spree – based on Ruby on Rails, SilverStripe, OS Commerce.  But there are many!

Still the following are things we want to understand:

How many products do you intend to sell online?

If a company or individual has only a few products to sell, we might recommend a totally different solution than we would if they had a few hundred, thousand or even a few hundred thousand items.  If there are only a few items for sale, we might also ask are they being sold one at a time? or would someone purchase several at one time.  If they are only likely to buy one type of item at a time, and if there are only a few items, a simple buy now button might suffice.

However if there are many items, and the user might purchase any number of different items then a shopping cart will be necessary.  Even then the cart we recommend will depend on the number of products, what kind of products those are and how those products will go into the online store once it is developed.

Naturally if there are only a few or even a few dozen they can be manually entered with great care to make sure everything is perfect for each item.  If there are a few thousand however, it is a completely different scenario.

Are the products simple or are they configurable?

If there are a lot of products the next thing we might want to know is what the products look like from a data point of view.  Are they simple products like a white undershirt that comes in three sizes?  Or are they configurable products like a shirt that comes in three sizes, 9 colors and a choice of 5 different images on the shirt?

These two scenarios might look completely different in the store, and certainly will be completely different when loading the data in.

Which brings us to the next point

How will the products be entered into the store?

Some distributors and manufacturers do an excellent job of providing product catalogs in a CSV format with excellent descriptions, titles, images and everything you need to put them into your online store.  Interestingly however most of them don’t.  It is like they deliberately don’t want you to be able to define their product to your customers.

If the number of items is small manually entering them is a great option, but again for a large number of items this can be a huge job.  And it is important if your dealing with iBCScorp or some other E-commerce or web design company, that you consider before you start the project how you will get the data into your new online store.

We have had to do all kinds of things in the past, from manually entering product data from paper catalogs, to writing code to screen scrape the market in order to capture product data to populate stores.  The simplest way however is typically a simple CSV import provided you can get good clean data.

Once the data is loaded into the system, you can optimize each page with the help of our SEO experts to help make that data distinct and better than any competitors who may have used the same CSV import.  It is important that any website be easy to maintain – not just the product data, but other product related data as well using a Content Management System.

Is a Content Management System CMS required?

I think mostly yes it is required.  Sometimes it is not, like if you already have one, or if somehow you have a fixed list of clientele who you sell to and you don’t necessarily need to market on the internet, otherwise I would say definitely so.

In some cases a customer may have an extensive wordpress or Joomla Blog already in place with tons of traffic.  Lets not ruin a good thing we can figure out a way to add a store to or along side an existing community or traffic source, this is fine and a CMS may not be required accept for being able to manage product content.

Also there are rare cases where customers have come to us with a set list of clients they sell to – say distributors, and they don’t even want their products necessarily to be available for non distributors – so they don’t care about SEO, they don’t care about press releases and they don’t need to drive traffic to their site.  If this isn’t you then you need a CMS.

Many customers over look the importance of a content management system (CMS) with their online store.  Truth is building a better mousetrap doesn’t really work.  There have been many many ideas which have failed because it doesn’t matter how great your product or idea is if people don’t know about it.  This is where a CMS is important.  The content in a CMS helps drive traffic, and helps to educate your potential clients about your company and products.

No a just putting up some static html pages doesn’t cut it.  The content needs to be dynamic and living.  Posting new information about new products, new research, new uses etc. for your products, otherwise, it is a declining market for you, even if your selling a commodity item, the information about that item is an important part of making a purchasing decision online.

Another important question we ask is how will the product be paid for?

How will you take payment on your online store?

This may seem like an obvious one, but it isn’t.  There are all kinds of issues to think about.  If your low volume PayPal may be fine.  If your higher volume however you definitely will need a merchant account and a payment gateway.

A merchant account is the same thing that all retailers use to process credit cards.  In a brick and mortar store, they use a machine to swipe your card.   This is accepted a secure way to take payment.  When taking payments over the internet, we have the same security concerns.  These concerns are handled by what is called a payment gateway.  This payment gateway replaces the swipe machine at the grocery store, and they process all of the transactions through to the merchant account.  The merchant account then processes them through to your bank.

Still there are other things to consider – such as are there recurring payments, partial payments or other special arrangements.  These are definitely issues which should be understood before any e-commerce project is started.  Another is how will you deliver product once it is paid for?

How will you deliver what you have sold?

Will this be a web based delivery, will you be shipping products?  How will you ship them USPS, UPS, Common Carrier, International?  In some cases we have had clients do custom shipping quotes because they have to schedule freight.  In most cases however simple USPS and UPS integration suffice.  There is obviously a whole lot of issues behind this one as well such as drop shipping, order processing, warehouse management etc.  These issues usually step beyond an e-commerce platform, but they are a huge piece of e-commerce.  Typically the fulfillment, accounting, purchasing etc. are handled in another system like an ERP system – we do this but I won’t cover that here.

What e-commerce sites do you like and what do you like about them?

Yep, don’t hesitate to look around at what other people are doing right and wrong.  If you find a good concept, it is often easier to show us a site that you like and say we want a widget on there similar to this.  Also for design this can help us get an idea of what you are looking for.

What is your budget?

Yea I know we ask this question and we hear all the time, I don’t want to tell you what my budget is I want you to tell me what it is going to take.

Our objective however is to deliver you the best product we can within a budget that is affordable and fits with your plans.  Sometimes this can’t be done, but usually it can.  We will work hard to balance out feature requirements with an affordable budget to give you the best we can.  We want you to be a successful business and for us to be a partner with you supporting you long term and helping your business grow.

If you want to talk about your e-commerce ideas please don’t hesitate to give us a call.  435-215-4674.

Internet Business Consu

“HCG Nexus gives you the necessary tools to lose weight safely and quickly.” It is a hormone weight loss formula that is safe and all natural. HCG alters the way the body stores and distributes fat, and it also re-calibrates your metabolism.

iBCScorp built HCG Nexus’ site from scratch and also did their site’s design work. iBCScorp built the site using WordPress CMS, so the client can easily manage and update their product information on their own.

iBCScorp is a web development company located in St. George, Utah with an off shore location in Sri Lanka. To receive a free quote or if you have questions about your website, please call 435-215-4674.

“Your source for everything temple,” is the overall theme for the site. There is a wide array of products available through the site, such as: temple artwork, temple clothes, temple home décor, books about the temple, even temple tours. This site will enable consumers to purchase LDS products regardless of location.

The ldstemplestore website includes artwork of featured artists such as: Al Rounds, Chad Hawkins, Courtney Lunt, Eric Dowdle, Jeremy Winborg, Jon McNaughton, Kendall Davenport, Larry Winborg, Sandra Rast, Marcia Johnson, and Steve Bartholomew.

Another fun thing about LDS Temple Store is the wide variety of temple related products.  Art takes on many forms, and you can see a lot of them on this site, CTR Rings, Current Temple Recommend Holder rings, carvings, recommend holders and more.

IBCSCorp.com worked to build the site using silverstripe e-commerce software. They also implemented auto-generated e-mails and pdf invoice attachments for ldstemplestore.com.  Some of the complicated features included data migration to silverstripe.

“I hope my art has a positive impact on people’s lives, that the viewers may be motivated to become, in the words of President Howard W. Hunter, ‘a temple-attending and a temple-loving people,” is what Chad’s vision is and the purpose of his work.  This site helps him fulfill his purpose by providing access to his artwork to a larger number of individuals.

Some of Chad’s artwork includes: paintings of over 100 LDS Temple’s, temple recommend holders, works of the Angel Moroni Statue, etchings of temples, scripture covers, and paintings of US Constitutional Landmarks.

For members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day-Saints, Chad Hawkins art work provides memories of special occasions and experiences which occurred at a special place. ChadHawkins.com is based out of the Salt Lake City area, however Chad’s pieces include perhaps the widest array of LDS Temple artwork anywhere, with temples from all over the world.

IBCScorp located in Saint George Utah, worked with Chad’s designs and artistic abilities to build this product out using Silverstripe e-commerce engine.  Silverstripe was chosen because it allows the administrators to easily add, update and edit content.

Crimson AV provides a wide variety of Audio and visual mounting solutions.  Their primary client base is professional audio visual equipment dealers and audio visual installers.

Because Crimson AV has over 15 years of experience in the design, manufacture and sales of professional mounting equipment, they can help people who maybe have never purchased mounting equipment select the right product, makes sure it is compatible and give information about installation.  They also can provide support to audio visual installers and resellers.

Their products include projector mounts, fat panel mounts, monitor mounts, audio visual carts and stands, speaker mounts, Flat panel wall mounts, in wall boxes and a large array of Audio Visual accessories.

Crimson AV has contracted with IBCScorp to help improve their current website as well as to help build their brand name recognition through PPC (Pay Per Click) advertising and SEO (Search Engine Optimization).  Over the next several weeks SEO Experts and Ruby on Rails based Spree shoping cart experts will be working on various improvements in the shopping cart process, making the site more friendly to its customers.  Internet Business Consulting Services will also help with search engine friendly URLS and other web optimization and SEO work.