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Weaving_Culture_Into_e Commerce
| Weaving Culture Into e-Commerce
Weaving Culture Into e-Commerce Copyright © 2003. All rights
reserved You probably already know that the non-English speaking
Internet audience transacts 63% of the global e-Commerce
transactions. If you know that then you’re definitely aware that
by 2004 this audience is expected to growth more than 10
percent. That’s at least 2 trillion dollars multiplied by 75%…
...need I say more. I going to share two words with you that
should help towards your International e-Commerce Market Entry
initiative. These word need to be taken very seriously if you
wish to become truly successful in International e-Commerce.
“Local and Language!” Yes the local language of your Internet
audience needs to be considered very carefully. Not only is it
polite to show your non-English speaker their local language,
but also you’ll find a keen sense of trust that develops by the
time your purchaser hits that purchase button. It’s all about
developing trust and a comfort level sufficient enough that your
customer will purchase your product. I have spent many years
working Internationally and there’s nothing more important than
developing a relationship through the use of language. When it
comes to shopping carts you don’t want to be one of those
abandoned shopping cart statistics. A high percentage of your
non-English speakers will abandon the purchase if your website
is not in their language, but more importantly if the shopping
cart is not in their native language the likelihood of an
abandoned transaction will be very high. If they do not have a
comfort level to understand for example the fine print, shipping
costs, the product that they’re getting you can expect – No
Purchase! The Multilingual Shopping Cart
****************************** This short articles focuses on
two key International, multilingual, commercial grade shopping
cart solutions. One is free and the other one will cost you some
money. Without a doubt its a significant challenge to implement
a shopping cart solution that has the ability to service the
International (and more specifically the non-Englising) Internet
Population. There are many ‘ready made’ International Shopping
Cart solutions. Most of the solutions are ready to integrate
directly into your existing e-Commerce infrastructure, one of
which is OSCommerce (OSC) and another is Shopfactory. If you’re
on a tight budget then OSC could be right for you. It is 100%
free, although it may require an ‘OSC expert’ to handle the
integration. OSC does make a claim that the software is an
‘out-of-the-box installation... minimum effort...". You should
take into account your level of expertise. It may be more cost
effective to bring in an OSC guru. OSC is extremely robust. It
includes PHP modules (a web scripting language), and runs on top
of various platforms such as Linux, Solaris, BSD, and Microsoft
Windows. OSC also makes use MySQL as a backend, and probably as
no surprise the Apache version of OSC is the most stable. OSC is
a mature product. At last count they had about 1,400
implementations, and are backed by a well rounded International
development and Support organization. Some of the OSC members
are from Spain, Japan, France, Australia, USA, and Germany. OSC
is a true Open Source Solution, just like that of UNIX. There
are customized versions of OSC, but the public source is still
controlled as an Open Source License. It seems that the intent
of OSC is to keep the license in the public domain. Here are
some live examples of the OSC implementations. Please note that
these are random selections, and are not necessarily endorsed by
The eCommerce Growth Group: Japanese:
http://usa-generalstore.com/index.html Spanish:
http://www.nucleodigital.com ienda/default.php German:
http://www.bbsstore.de/
You can get more details on OSC at their website:
http://oscommerce.com They also have a companion website that
handles the product documentation and support. The website can
be found at: http://oscdox.com Over 100,000 Shops
****************** The other product is Shopfactory. This is a
product that I have covered in Japan Online: New Opportunities
and New Markets. I included this software because it has
Japanese language and currency support (amongst many other
software vendors too) capabilities. In fact, the solution has
been thoroughly tested in and for the Japanese market. Unlike
OSC this product comes with a price tag attached to it. The cost
is affordable though - an entry level price of $179, and a high
end of approximately $1,000 for the full blown International
version. Shopfactory boast more than 100,000 shops globally and
supports a dozen languages. I thought it may be helpful to take
a look at the product from a very high level... It’s a website
development tool that automates the creation of complex
websites. ShopFactory has a lot in common with Microsoft
FrontPage, because ShopFactory never requires you to program
HTML code. However, experts do have the option of customizing
the appearance with manual HTML entry. ShopFactory also supports
templates that change the colors and appearance of your entire
website with a couple mouse clicks. Finally ShopFactory manages
the toolbars for navigation throughout your website. Despite the
high-level similarities with Microsoft FrontPage, ShopFactory is
a very different tool. Whereas FrontPage is designed to handle
generic websites, ShopFactory is specifically designed to build
shopping carts. Therefore ShopFactory automatically manages the
functions that are required for shopping carts. Some examples
are a privacy policy, an introductory front page, departments,
product pages, an item cart, checkout, shipping cost
calculations, and payment handling. All of these functions are
automated, so you and your staff can focus on describing your
company and your products without getting tied down in technical
details. The Website Wizard ****************** After running
ShopFactory for the first time, the program presents you with
the Website Startup Wizard designed to step you through the
process of setting up your first site. First the Wizard asks you
about the introductory (index.html) page, with fields for Title,
Introduction, Description, and Logo Image. All fields are
optional, and the difference between the Introduction and
Description are the position on the page and the size of the
font used. The next step of the Wizard asks for the theme of the
website. Themes are a preconfigured settings for the overall
look and feel of the website, including fonts, colors, graphics
used to spice up the site, the location of the navigation bar
and title, the location of the “Add to Cart” button relative to
the items, and other settings. In the demo version of the
software there are already 33 different themes, plus several
color options within each theme. The themes are also
customizable, allowing you to start with a default theme and
modify it to your requirements. It is important to emphasize
that the theme settings span all the pages of your site, for a
consistent look and feel throughout the site. Once you select
the theme of the site, the Wizard asks you for the contact
information for the company. This information is automatically
inserted into the relevant pages of the site, such as the About
Us page. Next in the Wizard is the Classification page, which
lets you select up to 15 categories for your site, Such as
Beverages (Alcoholic, Coffee and Tea), or Children (Baby,
Gifts), etc. These categories are used to list your site on the
company’s portal mall. The final step of the Wizard presents you
with various Optional Settings buttons. We will discuss these,
along with some advanced features of ShopFactory in another
article. Lastly you press “Finish” in the Wizard, which will
leave you at the main window of ShopFactory. Here all of the
various components of your website are listed in the left panel,
where they can be easily edited or modified. From here you
should save your website, and you also have the option of
previewing the website in a web browser. It is important to
remember that all the settings configured by the wizard can be
edited or modified later via several properties panels. The
wizard provides a mechanism to get a basic website working very
quickly. As you are stepping through the Wizard don't spend too
much time deliberating the various details, because they are
very easy to preview and change later. A demo version of
ShopFactory is available at:
http://www.shopfactory.com/index.html Last Words ********** As
you can see language presentation is an extremely important
component to be successful in the International e-Commerce
Market. Hopefully these two shopping cart solutions will help
with your e-Commerce initiative. They are proven and tested to
work in the International e-Commerce arena.
About the author:
Author: Gary Hyman has lived and worked Internationally over the
last 20 years. He is a well known e-Commerce consultant,
assisting organizations to expand their e-Business globally. He
can be reached at info@ecommercegrowth.com. The e-Commerce
Growth Group at http://www.ecommercegrowth.com/.
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