BigCommerce is a new comer (well sort of new) to the list of ecommerce solutions BigCommerce is a hosted, fully managed version of Interspire Shopping Cart that was launched by Interspire in June 2009. With the Interspire Shopping Cart software being so highly popular and successful they the decided to launch a full blown hosted version of it, it’s a hosted solution meaning they take care of the servers, security, upgrades and backups for your online store so you don’t have to, this is great for small and large size businesses that looking to run there business and no worry about managing a server. Not I know I said ProStores was the The Best Ecommerce Website Builder, but I think BigCommerce could give them a run for their money and here is why.

BigCommerce does a pretty good job of describing all the features that are included in there service so I won’t do their job for them but instead I’ll touch on only a few of the key features and why they’re important in today’s web environment.

Reporting and Analytics

One thing you should always remember when running a website, whether it’s an affiliate site, blog, ecommerce site, or a subscription based site is that “the money is in the stats”, this will be where you spend most of your time after you’ve finished setting up your online store. Stats will tell you exactly what works and what doesn’t as well as what’s making you money and more importantly what’s costing you money. Of course if you don’t have a stats system with enough features to help you know how each and every part of your website is performing then you’ll just be wasting time. Big Commerce has 20+ performance reports some of which include daily conversion rates, inventory report, best and worst performing keywords, order location (Google Maps) just to name a few. You can also integrate your store with Google Analytics which is one of the best site tracking services available on the web not to mention it’s FREE!.

Built In SEO

SEO is important but it’s not something you should spend all your time on, most services out there coming with basic SEO features included while others completely ignore them, stay away from website building services that don’t have SEO features built in. BigCommerce web pages are optimized by experts and make proper use of title tags and search engine friendly SEO links, of course there a tons of other things to know about SEO but most of them are not worth the time to learn, trust me the search engines are smart enough to rank your site for accurate search terms.

Google Merchant Center (Formerly known as Google Base)

If there was ever a source for getting free traffic to your store this would be it, if your not familiar with Google Merchant Center it’s where you can upload your store’s product feeds and make them easy to find on Google Product Search. The thing is most store owners or people looking to start a online store don’t even know what a store feed is or how to create one, basically a store feed is a XML file (don’t need to know what it means) that is automatically generated for your site that allows you to automatically syndicate all your products across product search engines and comparison shopping sites like PriceGrabber.com, BizRate .com, Shopping.com, Yahoo Shopping and much more. This is a untapped way of driving traffic to your website because most store owners are not using this free source traffic simply because they are not aware of it or their site isn’t equipped to create store feeds. BigCommerce automatically generates store feeds for your site that can be submitted to Google Merchant Center as well as other product search engines and comparison shopping sites.

The best thing about the features is that Product results show up above natural search results, so you don’t have to worry about ranking for search terms in the search engines just list your products in the product search section and your good to go. (Example Image below)

Affiliate Tracking System (Affiliate Marketing)

Apart from Reporting and Analytics, this is by far the most important part of your business at least in my business, for those not familiar with Affiliate Marketing it’s an Internet-based marketing practice in which a business rewards one or more affiliates for each visitor or customer brought about by the affiliates marketing efforts, usually that affiliate is paid a commission when a sale is made, or if a lead is generated. It is also known a performance based marketing in other words you only pay for results. Imagine if you launched a website and you had a thousand people advertising your site for you for free and the only time you would have to pay those people is when they refer a paying customer, that’s power of affiliate marketing and if you don’t offer  affiliate programs for your store in this day and age then your definitely at a huge disadvantage. The problem here is that most website building solutions do not come with affiliate marketing built in, BigCommerce however comes with a built in affiliate tracking system that allows you to track, manage and pay your affiliates. 75% of my sales come from affiliate referrals, this is not a feature that should be overlooked.

There are a bunch of other great features such as drag and drop layout design, support for 50 plus payment gateways, Google Awords and Yahoo Search Marketing export, Single page checkout and the list goes on, but I’ll leave that up to BigCommerce to list all the features.

Here are A few live sites…..
YuBo
Christine & Taylor
Pro Golfer Gear
Report Collection
Baby and Me Gifts

In Conclusion

Apart from ProStores this is by far one of the best online store builders that I’ve seen on the market, they both have pretty much all of the same feature sets with a few differences, it all depends on what your looking for.

Visit:BigCommerce

Features:

• Free domain name
• Unlimited disk space
• Unlimited transfer
• Photo, audio, and video galleries
• Use yahoo design tools or your own editing tools. FrontPage, Dreamweaver)
• Use your own designs or pre-made yahoo store designs.
• Experts available to build the a site for you.
• Sell up 50,000 products in your yahoo store.
• Accurate inventory tracking that alerts you when you need to reorder.
• Checkout pages can be designed to match the rest of your website’s theme.
• The option of multi page or single page checkout to increase sales.
• Create custom fields to collect relevant information from your customers.
• A reliable hosting platform.
• Marketing tools to help you with marketing your products.
• Easily authorize orders, issue refunds and print shipping labels.
• Choose any shipping provider and customize rates and fees to fit your needs.

Benefits:

1. 60 days of store setup consulting at no extra charge.
2. 24-7 tool free phone technical support.
3. Helpful extensive guides, tutorials and online help is available.
4. Advance website security encryption.
5. Ability to easily integrate PayPal into your shopping cart.
6. Track sales and more with 40 reports that gives you a 360 degree view of your business.

Webmaster Review:

Ok, there are two feedback that I’ve seen on the internet regarding Yahoo Merchant solutions, and that is either they hate it or they love it. There is no middle ground with this product, my review is probably the only middle ground that you will probably find on the internet.

My experience with Yahoo Merchant Solutions was a good one, I created it to sell video game consoles and accessories. I had no real inventory since everything was shipped from a drop shipper, I was able track all my inventory and sales through Yahoo’s product tracking interface and with over 40 reports you can do far more than that.

I was doing over $10,000 /mo in sales after expenses, which is nothing compared to other yahoo store owners. I accepted all my payments through PayPal which was completely integrated into the yahoo store via the shopping cart. I’ve since then sold the business and the new owner continues to use Yahoo Merchant Solutions to host the store.

If you don’t think my figures are impressive, then maybe you can take a look at another Yahoo Small Business customer, who has been using Yahoo stores for over 5 years. His name is Brad Fallen and his website is called MyWeddingFavors.com. He is ranked number 3 in Google for the search term “wedding favors”, which is searched for in Google for over 800,000 times a month. He brings in over $500,000/mo which makes my $10,000/mo look like nothing, He has a inventory of over 5000 products all of which is track, handled and manged using Yahoo Small Business solutions.

The bottom line is if you’re a small business owner with a offline business and your looking to make a smooth transition and create an online presence then Yahoo Merchant Solutions is a great choice.

Visit Yahoo Small Business

Please note that Yahoo Web Hosting is great for hosting Eccommerce websites. Blogs, CMS and other scripts are a completely different story.

The ability to automatically calculate shipping and tax information for various states and carriers such as FedEx and UPS. An easy way to mange your customers, inventory and orders as well as keeping track of your profit and expenses.

To achieve all this you would need a variety of tools and services that could possibly cost you thousands of dollars, and you haven’t even gotten to marketing and promoting your business. These are the obstacles that ecommerce business owners face and the reason why 90 percent of them fail within there first year. This dilemma created a demand for more efficient, less time consuming and a more cost effective ways of getting and online store up and running.

ProStores is one of the the few tools that has attempted to solve this a problem and has succeeded at doing so. ProStores an eBay company is a all in one online store solution that combines all the fundamental tools required to operate an online store and then kicks it into overdrive by offering many more features and add-ons that makes running a online store as simple as writing a email.

So what’s some of the benefits of using a solution like ProStores?

Easy Store Design

lets face most individuals looking to start there own store are not web designers, with ProStores you can choose from more than 150 professionally designed eCommerce templates, easily upload your logo or create one with ProStores built in logo creator. If you do have some design skills you can custom design your store with 3rd party HTML editing tools. You can also have a custom store designed by one ofProStores certified web designers.

Sell on eBay Automatically

Obviously ProStores being an eBay company gives you the ability to sell your products to over 250 million potential customers on the web’s number one marketplace. You can automatically list to eBay fromProStores, everything such as your inventory, shipping and tax cost will be synced with eBay.

Accept Payments

Easily take payments online with web’s leading payment processors such as PayPal (Also a eBay company), Authorize.net, Quick Books, Link Point and more.

Automatic Search Engine Optimization

By using ProStores you can rank higher in search engines such as Google, Yahoo and MSN with the use of search engine friendly URLs that are automatically tuned for the best search engine performance. Automatic site map creation and customizable product keywords.

Quick Listings on Shopping Sites

ProStores will automatcially submit your products to Google Base which is a free service that can quickly drive drive targeted consumers to your website. They also provide tools for you to submit your products to the three major shopping comparison search engines Shopping.com^®, Yahoo! Shopping^®, and Shopzilla^®.

Who is ProStores Mostly Suited For?

ProStores is suitable for both small to mid sized busniesses whether your selling a few hundred products or a hundred thousand products, ProStores can scale to meet your needs.

Screenshot of few different stores powered by ProStores.

In Conclusion

Now more than ever business owners are looking for the most cost effective ways to build an online business and get the biggest bang for there buck,ProStores breaks down most of the walls you will run into when running your online business and provides the service at a fraction of the cost if you were to do it by other means. Of course there is no truly end all be all solution for running a business but you definitely benefit from starting out down the path with the least amount of resistance.

Check out the service at ProStores