Friday, June 1, 2012

Mobile e-Commerce Solutions


Mobile Commerce, also known as M-Commerce or mCommerce, is the ability to conduct commerce using mobile devices.

The need for mobility is the primary driving force behind mobile commerce, or mCommerce. With the rapid increase in smartphone penetration across the globe, mobile commerce has gained increasing acceptance amongst both users and retailers. Mobile services are continuing to register impressive growth and mCommerce is also being embraced in sync.

Just give a look at the pictures, how they are differed in pc website and mobile websites



Advantages of Mobile eCommerce

The advantages of mCommerce (Mobile - eCommerce) are:
  • Providing wider reach
  • Reducing transaction cost
  • Streamline business processes
  • Reducing time to order
  • The age of mobile shopping is here to stay, consumers can access millions of products at the palm of their hands and retailers can increase their reach and overall sales.
  • New advanced mobile applications characteristically engage high-speed services being accessed by devices  distantly, anywhere, any time
  • People were concerned about credit card security back then, even more so than today, so that was a big barrier to overcome.

A direct impact on  mCommerce, as consumers expect seamless access through mobile devices, the ability to search for, select, and purchase products, along with 24/7 service wherever and whenever they require.

Retail and B2B are being revolutionized through mobile applications. Innovative mobile apps can now help to reduce lines and accelerate checkout, audit inventory levels, schedule deliveries, enhance customer service, increase loyalty and create additional revenue streams. Mobile applications can help you generate better return on operational investment, accelerate speed to market, and lower capital expenditures.

Also mCommerce pave the way for
  • Instant buying: Instant buying is another advantage of mcommerce. A personal computer may not always be available when you need a product or service. Thus, sales definitely get declined due to lack of an instant medium. Mobile eCommerce fills this marketing and e-commerce void by providing an instant checkout and payment gateway service.
  • Combo marketing: Retailers can reach for the mobile users using mobile messages and can invoke sale opportunities. If e-commerce application is installed on mobiles, consumers don’t need to give second thoughts. As a business owner, this can help you to target niches that are most likely to buy a particular product you offer.
  • Increased traffic: Another advantage of providing mCommerce is that it can be used to usher in the much needed online traffic. People like to surf through their smart-phones and if you generate an app of your website, then each time a user runs the app, you get the needed traffic boost. The easy usage of these apps leads to repeated visits of people to your website.
  • Fast loading: Since mobile applications don’t have too many unnecessary details vis-a-vis their web versions, they can be used in a shorter span. They load fast as they are developed in a simpler framework and use fewer web components. This way you get easy-to-load content that can be surfed in a jiffy.
  • Ease of navigation: With the touch interface, navigation is simpler in mobiles as compared to laptops or PC’s. Hence, searching through and pitching sales through mobile devices is easier for customers
For more details about mobile eCommerce portal, please feel free to contact Prevaj Consultants at prevaj@prevajconsultants.com or call +91-8144760745.  

 

Tuesday, May 29, 2012

Benefits reaped from SCHOOL/COLLEGE MANAGEMENT SOFTWARE

“Every generation needs a revolution” by Thomas Jefferson. Humans can never accept a monotone life style and always strive to get more or better whatever they have to bring some “radical” changes in their lives. This technological transformation has affected every field including the educational sector. Schools & Colleges have adopted and implemented Management Software for better administration and to concentrate more on the area of their core competence i.e. delivery of knowledge.

These days every school and college need to take care of lot many things like admissions, personal records of teachers and students, fees collection & expenses and  in order to have systematic management of the administration of institute, School/College Management Software is implemented.

Earlier the maintenance of records of students & teachers used to be the most tedious and hectic task for the institute. However with School/College Management Software for Colleges and Schools, the process of record storage becomes easy , secure , hassle free and time saving. Also with the automation of Fees collection, the administration are facilitated to have accurate record.

Managing a college can be a colossal challenge through the traditional systems and most colleges will agree that managing the daily and regular activities of a college is a herculean task. There are numerous functions, departments and sections that need to be coordinated and integrated within a single system.These software systems are one time investments for the management, and every college and university that wishes to grow in the field of education will find the platform an engrossing and beneficial one. Listed are some compelling reasons to invest in such software.

  • Bring professionalism -  School/College Management Software can ensure professionalism at all levels of the organization and introduces a platform that will convert most of the manual desk jobs.
  • Bring integration -  All functions and departments of all colleges can be integrated under School/College Management Software . This includes admissions, examination, payroll, accounts, canteen, stock and inventory, transport, hostel, etc. All the data that is stored on the software can be used for compiling and generating information at all points of time.
  • Offering security of data - Most of the School/College Management Software take the data security to a high level. The data of all sections and branches are stored in a web server that is secured through advanced systems. The data stored on the server can be only accessed by authorized persons of the top level management and regulatory bodies.
  • Better relations with students: School/College Management Software allow management of colleges to launch a virtual platform that can be used by students for contacting the college. They can gain knowledge about all the relevant information about the admissions, fee structure, semester’s examination dates, events and happenings. The physical notice board system will be replaced by an interface that is smart, adept and fast to access and interpret.
  • Real time report generation: School/College Management Software processes data gathered in a fast manner. As such, generating reports from the available data is not a daunting task. Management can use such reports, generally presented in charts and tables, for analyzing the performance of various departments.
  • Reduced work load: School/College Management Software are based on recording of data on a large platform without complicating the tasks. As such, this will reduce manual work and will put less pressure, and, college management software will be able to reduce the cost of regular work to as much as 60%.
  • Brings uniformity in operation: Every educational institution has its own set of functions. Although the functions of colleges and universities are same at the core, there are some differences in the mode of operation. School/College Management Software ensures that all functions of management are integrated on a single and effective platform that is scalable and easy to comprehend.

School/College Management Software is all about bringing a systemized way of managing the entire organization.The new college management software is a onetime investment and offers benefits to the management and students alike.

Moreover School/College Management Software for institutes provide a transparent mode of education, wherein the parents can always keep an eye on their wards progress, extracurricular activities,  events, meetings many more activities going on in the institution. Similarly , the students are well updated about their scores, assignments, faculty, timetable,notices through College Management Software.

It's very evident that such School/College Management Software for School & Colleges have made the lives easy for their stakeholders i.e. students, parents, teachers and management.

For more details about web based School/College Management Software, please feel free to contact
Prevaj Consultants at prevaj@prevajconsultants.com or call +91-8144760745.

Monday, May 28, 2012

E-commerce Marketing



E-commerce marketing is all about attracting web surfers to your site and, once there, to make them a customer. While overall similar to marketing a physical business, e-commerce marketing has some unique ingredients. For instance, marketing a physical store requires substantial enticement to move a customer to take the effort to physically come by your store location. It also means that the customer has an “investment” in the visit. They have expended time, energy and money to get to the location.

Many e-commerce marketing companies look at this and use it to justify increased spending on getting new traffic to the web site. For the small and medium business the cost of increasing traffic to the site is substantial and will continue to increase. Just five years ago it cost almost nothing to bring new visitors to the site. As the competition has increased, however, this has fast become the most costly aspect of having an e-commerce web site.

On the other hand,Internet marketing success as the total cost of converting visitors into customers. This allows  to measure the effectiveness of total marketing program including getting new visitors, web site design, customer service and after sales marketing.

E-commerce Marketing Priorities can be divided into three primary divisions:

  • Enticing visitors (non-customers) to come to the site
    • Search engine registration (natural search results)
    • Pay-per-click
    • Public relations – news releases, articles and stories
    • Online advertising (banners, links / cross-links, directories, newsletter placement, etc.)
  • Converting visitors (non-customers) into customers
    • In-site promotions
    • Sales / Special Offers
    • In-store Coupons
    • Associated Products
    • Customer Recommendations
    • Opt-in Email Promotions
  • Site Effectiveness
    • Enticing appropriate visitor behavior
    • Establishing emotional context
    • Building relationships
    • Increasing per-customer purchases
    • After sale marketing
    • After sale relationship building

In many cases the visitor has almost no investment in visiting the e-commerce web site. With no investment the site needs to provide sufficient and immediate enticement/reward to keep the visitor from clicking the back button and going to another site. This requires a very close relationship between the keywords used in their search (or the information in the advertising) to the content on the web page they view. The closer the relationship the more chance of enticing the visitor to continue looking at the site.

Conversely, the online customer has almost no investment in the visit. Going to the site requires one click of a mouse. Leaving the site requires one click of the mouse.


For more details about E-Commerce Consulting, Website Development and Maintenance please feel free to contact Prevaj Consultants at prevaj@prevajconsultants.com or call +91-8144760745.

Thursday, November 10, 2011

Zen Cart - Shopping Cart Management

  • Zen Cart is an Open Source online store management system. It is PHP-based, using a MySQL database and HTML components. Support is provided for several languages and currencies, and it is freely available under the GNU General Public License.
  • Zen Cart branched from osCommerce as a separate project. The major differences between the two systems come from Zen Cart's architectural changes and additional included features in the core.
  • Zen Cart's default installation provides everything needed to maintain a shopping cart web site. Products, pricing, shipping, newsletters, sales etc. are managed by the store owner through the administration area.
  • The shopping cart is set up to receive payments from major credit cards and several payment gateway services are also provided.
  • Some of the key features of Zen Cart are,
  1. Zen Cart provides multiple language support to the customers.
  2.  Allows customers to shop your store 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, 365 days a year.
  3. Updating the product or catalog is very easy, no HTML coding required for adding, deleting, or modifying products.
  4. It is very safe and secure, no one but your administrative personnel can access your customer/catalog data.
  5. Easy to install, helpful installation program guides you easily help you through the setup process.
  6. It has unlimited category depth which allows you to have as many product categories.
  7. PhpBB integration through external module.
  8. User frontend is validated to XHTML 1.0 Transitional.
  9. It also provides you with multiple shipping options and multiple payments options along with a newsletter manager.
  • Zen Cart is easily customizable to whatever your needs, depending on the skills and resources you have available. Only minimal skills are required to get started.
  • Advanced customizations may require stronger knowledge of CSS, HTML, and maybe PHP or maybe even MySQL, depending on your unique requirements.
For more details about E-Commerce Consulting, Website Development and Maintenance please feel free to contact Prevaj Consultants at prevaj@prevajconsultants.com or call +91-8144760745.

Wednesday, November 9, 2011

Search Engine Marketing (SEM)

Search Engine Marketing, (SEM), is a form of Internet marketing that seeks to promote websites by increasing their visibility in search engine result pages (SERPs) through the use of paid placement, contextual advertising, and paid inclusion. Depending on the context, SEM can be an umbrella term for various means of marketing a website including SEO, or it may contrast with SEO, focusing on just paid components.

Major SEM Tools
There are four categories of tools to help you optimize websites.
1. Keyword research and analysis: (a) Make sure the site can be indexed in the search engines; (b) find the most relevant and popular key terms and phrases for the site and its products; and (c) use those key phrases on the site in a way that will generate and convert traffic.
2. Website saturation and popularity: show how much presence a website has on search engines through the number of pages of the site that are indexed on each search engine (saturation) and how many times the site is linked to by other sites (popularity). It requires your pages containing those keywords people are looking for and ensure that they rank high enough in search engine rankings. The followings are major tools measuring various aspects of saturation and link popularity: Link Popularity, Top 10 Google Analysis, and Marketleap's Link Popularity and Search Engine Saturation.
3. Back end tools (including Web analytic tools and HTML validators): Web analytic tools can help you to understand what is happening to your website and measure your website's success. They range from simple traffic counters to tools that work with log files and to more sophisticated tools that are based on page tagging. These tools can deliver conversion-related information. Validators check the invisible parts of websites, highlighting potential problems and many usability issues ensure your website meets W3C code standards. Try to use more than one HTML validator or spider simulator because each tests, highlights, and reports on slightly different aspects of your website.
4. Who Is tools: show you who owns and operates various webites, can provide valuable information relating to copyright and trademark issues. Useful tools include Who Is Source, ARIN. Read a competitor's source code to look for hidden clues, Use Web analytics tools to find out more about your customers, Use the source code and Who Is tools to research legal issues.
For more details about Search Engine Marketing (SEM), Search Engine Optimization (SEO) and E-Commerce Consulting  please feel free to contact Prevaj Consultants at prevaj@prevajconsultants.com or call +91-8144760745.

Key Features of WordPress

WordPress is a powerful personal publishing platform, and it comes with a great set of features designed to make your experience as a publisher on the Internet as easy, pleasant and appealing as possible.
  • Full standards compliance — We have gone to great lengths to make sure every bit of WordPress generated code is in full compliance with the standards of theW3C. This is important not only for interoperability with today’s browser but also for forward compatibility with the tools of the next generation. Your web site is a beautiful thing, and you should demand nothing less.
  • No rebuilding — Changes you make to your templates or entries are reflected immediately on your site, with no need for regenerating static pages.
  • WordPress Pages — Pages allow you to manage non-blog content easily, so for example you could have a static "About" page that you manage through WordPress. For an idea of how powerful this is, the entire WordPress.org site could be run off WordPress alone.
  • WordPress Links -- Links allow you to create, maintain, and update any number of blogrolls through your administration interface. This is much faster than calling an external blogroll manager.
  • WordPress Themes — WordPress comes with a full theme system which makes designing everything from the simplest blog to the most complicated webzine a piece of cake, and you can even have multiple themes with totally different looks that you switch with a single click. Have a new design every day.
  • Cross-blog communication tools— WordPress fully supports both the Trackback and Pingback standards, and we are committed to supporting future standards as they develop.
  • Comments — Visitors to your site can leave comments on individual entries and through Trackback or Pingback can comment on their own site. You can enable or disable comments on a per-post basis.
  • Spam protection — Out of the box WordPress comes with very robust tools such as an integrated blacklist and open proxy checker to manage and eliminate comment spam on your blog, and there is also a rich array of plugins that can take this functionality a step further.
  • Full user registration — WordPress has a built-in user registration system that (if you choose) can allow people to register and maintain profiles and leave authenticated comments on your blog. You can optionally close comments for non-registered users. There are also plugins that hide posts from lower level users.
  • Password Protected Posts — You can give passwords to individual posts to hide them from the public. You can also have private posts which are viewable only by their author.
  • Easy installation and upgrades — Installing WordPress and upgrading from previous versions and other software is a piece of cake. Try it and you'll wonder why all web software isn't this easy.
  • Easy Importing — We currently have importers for Movable Type, Textpattern, Greymatter, Blogger, and b2. Work on importers for Nucleus and pMachine are under way.
  • XML-RPC interface — WordPress currently supports an extended version of the Blogger API, MetaWeblog API, and finally the MovableType API. You can even use clients designed for other platforms like Zempt.
  • Workflow — You can have types of users that can only post drafts, not publish to the front page.
  • Typographical niceties — WordPress uses the Texturize engine to intelligently convert plain ASCII into typographically correct XHTML entities. This includes quotes, apostrophes, ellipses, em and en dashes, multiplication symbols, and ampersands.
  • Intelligent text formatting — If you've dealt with systems that convert new lines to line breaks before you know why they have a bad name: if you have any sort of HTML they butcher it by putting tags after every new line indiscriminately, breaking your formatting and validation. Our function for this intelligently avoids places where you already have breaks and block-level HTML tags, so you can leave it on without worrying about it breaking your code.
  • Multiple authors — WordPress’ highly advanced user system allows up to 10 levels of users, with different levels having different (and configurable) privileges with regard to publishing, editing, options, and other users.
  • Bookmarklets — Cross-browser bookmarklets make it easy to publish to your blog or add links to your blogroll with a minimum of effort.
  • Ping away — WordPress supports pinging Ping-O-Matic, which means maximum exposure for your blog to search engines.
For more details about E-Commerce Consulting, Website development and maintenance please feel free to contact Prevaj Consultants at prevaj@prevajconsultants.com or call +91-8144760745.

Tuesday, November 8, 2011

Latest Trends in E-Commerce

  1. Multichannel presences: There’s a growth of multichannel retailers as traditional high street brands expand their presences online.
  2. The rise of mobile-commerce: Following the increased usage of smartphones, major retailers are launching mobile sites and smartphone applications to encourage their customers to make purchases using their smartphones.
  3. The use of online payment services: There’ll be an increase in the usage of online payment services such as PayPal and Google Checkout as people want to make faster, easier, and more secure purchases over the Internet.
  4. Engaging customers online: Businesses are putting more effort into the design of their websites to ensure they provide their customers with an engaging online experience.
  5. The social element: Social networking options continue to expand onto ecommerce sites where site visitors can share their opinions about products on Facebook and Twitter.
For more details about E-Commerce Consulting, Website development and maintenance please feel free to contact Prevaj Consultants at prevaj@prevajconsultants.com or call +91-8144760745.

Tips for E-Commerce Websites

1. Think like a consumer, and put your products in more than one category. People purchase more and they experience greater overall satisfaction with the Web site. Consider up sell and cross sell opportunities by offering products that make logical sense together.

2. Keep it simple. Successful E-Commerce sites simplify the checkout process and display clear pricing and shipping information. They also post clear return policies and access to customer service. Putting your brick and mortar store's phone number in a visible place on your Web site is a good idea.

3. Picture really is worth a thousand words, so use photos of your products and go easy on the text. Online usability studies suggest that people do not read; they scan. It's 25% harder to read on the Web, so keep these guidelines in mind for optimum readability: Headlines should be 8 words or less, shoot for 9-12 words on a line (people don't want to read across the entire screen), keep sentences short (15-20 words) and try to keep summaries under 30 words and hold paragraphs to 40-70 words. In this way you can maintain compelling product descriptions alongside your product offerings. 

4. Market your site once it's live. It's not enough to just build a Web site. You need to make an effort to market and promote your Web site to new and existing customers. Collect email addresses on your site to help you keep in touch with customers and consider creating a newsletter. Seek links from other sites that complement yours. Optimize your site's content for relevance and submit it to the major search engines.

5. Make payment processing easy. Online shoppers need a way to give you money online. You can accept credit card payments with either a PayPal account or an online merchant account.



For more details about E-Commerce Consulting, Website development and maintenance please feel free to contact Prevaj Consultants at prevaj@prevajconsultants.com or call +91-8144760745.

Reasons to Use Drupal

  1.  Advanced URL Control — Unlike WordPress, Drupal gives you precise control over URL structure. Each item of content in Drupal (called a node) can be given a custom URL (called a URL alias). In WordPress you are generally limited to one type of permalink The Global Redirect Module will automatically 301 redirect the internal Drupal URL to the custom URL alias. Unlike many other content management systems, Drupal's content pages have nice clean URLs.
  2. Custom Content Types and Views — You can use the Content Construction Kit (CCK) and Views Modules to create new content types and create advanced custom views for them without writing any code. A few examples of "content types" are "blog posts", "news stories", "forum posts", "tutorials", "classified ads", "podcasts". Most content management systems would require writing code to accomplish these tasks, but there is no programming knowledge required to do them in Drupal.
  3. Revision Control — you can configure Drupal to save a new version of your pages every time they are editing. That means that you can go back to view or revert old revisions if you want.
  4. Taxonomy — Drupal has a powerful taxonomy (category) system that allows you to organize and tag content. Each Drupal "vocabulary" (set of categories) can be limited to certain content types. You can also have hierarchical categories, with single or multiple parent categories. Drupal's advanced taxonomy features, combined with CCK and Views; allow you to easily target all of those long-tail keywords that you researched in Wordtracker.
  5. User Management — Drupal was designed for community-based Web sites and has strong user role and access control functionality. You can create as many custom user roles with custom access levels as you need. For example you could create the following roles, each with different levels of access to your features: "anonymous visitor", "authenticated user", "moderator", "editor", "webmaster", "admin". You can keep the advanced user management features (like multiple blogs) turned off if you don't want them, enabling them later if your site grows to a point where you would like to add more community features.
  6. Page Titles and Meta Tags — Drupal's Page Title Module gives you custom control of your HTML <title> elements, while the Meta Tags Module gives you control over your pages' individual Meta description tags. This is difficult in some content management systems, but it's easy with Drupal.
  7. Excellent Documentation — Documentation includes the official handbooks, the massive API Reference, numerous tutorials, blogs, videos, and podcasts, and the excellent new book Pro Drupal Development.
  8. PHP Template — Drupal uses the PHP Template theme engine by default. Theming in Drupal is easier than theming in WordPress and doesn't necessarily require any PHP knowledge.
  9. Drupal Cookbooks — if you want a feature that is not built into Drupal by default, chances are that someone has already written a code snippet for it and posted it in the code snippets section of Drupal.org.
  10. Large and Friendly Community — The Drupal forum is highly active and are a great place to get your Drupal questions answered.
There are other open-source alternatives to Drupal, but here are a few reasons that Drupal is better:

  • Joomla - It's not as search engine friendly out of the box as Drupal.
  • Plone - It''s powerful, but Plone is written in Python and has certain server requirements. It is not as easy to extend as Drupal, and it's harder to find people who know Python than who know PHP.
  •  WordPress - WordPress is excellent, but if you need something more heavy-duty or are building a site that you might want to extend in the future you should be considering Drupal.
For more details about E-Commerce Consulting, Content Management Systems, Website development and maintenance please feel free to contact Prevaj Consultants at prevaj@prevajconsultants.com or call +91-8144760745.