Tag Archives: magento

Jun 16

Free shopping cart applications

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If you are you planning to create your online store here we will provide you with all the needed resources for your online business!

We value your time and efforts – building a professional online store without additional technical skills is what we offer. Moreover, our comprehension chart aims to provide you with the easiest and most convenient way of managing your online business.

Let`s start with what is a shopping cart.

In every e-commerce web site there is a shopping cart program. The latter allows your online visitors to find and buy products and services while browsing your online shop. In short, a shopping cart allows your potential online clients to do the following: search for a product in your store catalog, add a selected product to a basket, place an order and submit a payment for it.

If you are just starting out in e-commerce, we suggest reviewing several online shopping softwares, prior to choosing the one that suits your online business. We have made an extensive research among the most preferred shopping carts on the market and we are here to offer you the top-quality ones.

After a detailed research in the shopping cart field, here is what we recommend:

Magento is a new open source ecommerce platform that handle all aspects of building and maintaining an ecommerce site including shopping carts, shipping, product reviews, and much more. Magento offers advanced catalog and shopping cart price rule systems right out of the box, allowing Store Owners to create and customize anything from store-wide markdowns to highly specific coupons tailored to specialized customer groups. View more

Additional Magento resources:

oscommerce_logo osCommerce is an online shop e-commerce solution under on going development by the open source community. Its feature packed out-of-the-box installation allows store owners to setup, run, and maintain their online stores with minimum effort and with absolutely no costs or license fees involved. osCommerce combines open source solutions to provide a free and open e-commerce platform. It contains both a catalog frontend and an administration tool backend which can be easily installed and configured over a web-based installation procedure. View more

Additional osCommerce resources:

Professional and secure osCommerce hosting package
logo_cubecartCubeCart is a fully featured ecommerce shopping cart solution written using PHP & MySQL. CubeCart is very powerful and easy to connect to various payment gateways. CubeCart currently comes with three skins which are bundled in the download package.The demo has Google Checkout enabled in “Sandbox” mode and the “Print Order Form”. The skin can be changed using the drop down menu which is either enabled or disabled on the admin side. View more

Additional CubeCart resources:

Professional and secure CubeCart hosting package

CRE Loaded is a fully functional shopping cart for Ecommerce sites. CRELoaded is built on the framework of OSCommerce .CRE has been refined and simplified a little though, so it is easier to customize, and easier to maintain long term. It is a flexible enough cart to handle stock/inventory tracking, multiple images per item, downloadable items, combinations of product types, it tracks customers and orders, and interfaces with a wide range of payment systems. This is a software driven shopping cart. That means it installs into the hosting space – your website is made of software instead of regular pages. View more

Additional CreLoaded resources:

Professional and secure CreLoaded hosting package

zen-cart-logoZen Cart is a open source shopping cart system. When you are using Zen Cart and a product is added to the shopping cart, secure checkout is a simple 3-step process. After providing the billing information, your customer chooses the shipping method. (multiple shipping methods) Next, a payment type is chosen from one of the popular payment modules. Last, the customer reviews the order, shipping and payment choices, and confirms the order. You are immediately notified of the order and your customer automatically receives an e-mail confirmation. View more

Additional ZenCart resources:

Professional and secure ZenCart hosting package
logo_cscartCs cart is a shopping cart software solution that includes all the necessary features and functions to build a successful online business. It has easy to use functionality that allows you to immediately start to sell online, ranging from a one-product shop to a fully-featured online store. Using Cs cart you can add add products, categories, place orders and do everything you are interested in. Cs cart also includes:User Manual;Design integration guide;Installation on a local computer;Live Help manual;Store Manager manual;Knowledge Base

Additional CS Cart resources:

Professional and secure CS Cart hosting package

VirtueMart is an Open Source E-Commerce solution (a Component or Plug-in) for the Joomla! and Mambo Content Management Systems. It can be run as a Shopping Cart, or in Catalog modeIt installs fairly easy using the automatic Component and Module Installer. It’s intended for use in small / mid-sized Online Businesses / Online-Shops. So every user who wants to build up a Online Store can use this Component for selling something to Customers. View more

Additional Virtue Mart resources:

The document below provides a very detailed overview of the best open source eCommerce applications. Additionally, it includes a table of all the features included in the applications in order to compare and choose which one suits your needs best.

TMDHosting Free eCommerce Applications

If you need any professional assistance in choosing your hosting or have additional questions you can always contact our experienced representatives via our live chat.

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Mar 24

Free Magento templates

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We all know how important is the unique look of your eCommerce website for your business. Thus, TMDHosting has released twelve professional Magento templates which are freely available to our customers. Additionally, these templates are not available for public download and it is highly unlikable to find any other Magento website with the same template as your one.

Be advised that as a TMDHosting customer you are entitled to receive free Magento installation as well as free templates and components installation performed by our highly experienced support team as a part of our Magento hosting package.

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If you need any assistance in the process you can always contact our experienced and friendly representatives via our live chat.

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Mar 23

Magento hosting

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In this article we will summarize the most important points that should be covered when you are looking for a Magento hosting. Be advised that these topics are based on the official documentation, recommendations and forum of Magento as well as customer feedback and search engine key words research.

  • System requirements compatibility
  • Extra fees and installation services
  • Knowledge base, tutorials and extras
  • Technical support and eCommerce experience
  • General Hosting plan features

System requirements compatibility

The first and most important point is that your future host should be fully compatible with Magento system requirements. Most of the modern hosting companies should be compatible with some of the Magento requirements. Still, be advised that your host should be fully compatible with all of them for best performance. It is important to mention that no a hosting service which does not fully cover the official requirements is not absolutely qualified for the Magento eCommerce platform.

You can easily check a hosting server about its Magento compatibility by the official Mangeto check script. For example, below are the results that should be displayed if your hosting is fully qualified for Magento application. The results are from our TMDHosting server:

Congratulations! Your server meets the requirements for Magento.

  • You have PHP 5.2.0 (or greater)
  • Safe Mode is off
  • You have MySQL 4.1.20 (or greater)
  • You have the curl extension
  • You have the dom extension
  • You have the gd extension
  • You have the hash extension
  • You have the iconv extension
  • You have the mcrypt extension
  • You have the pcre extension
  • You have the pdo extension
  • You have the pdo_mysql extension
  • You have the simplexml extension

You can download the Magento compatibility check script from here.

If you would like to perform the Magento compatibility check on your end, please click here.

Extra fees and installation services

It is very important to be aware of any other fees that are applied in additional to your hosting plan. For example, if your hosting company charges for Magento installation services or any extra fees are applied for modules, components and themes installation.

As most PHP/MySQL based applications the Magento installation is a straight forward procedure and you should not be charged for this service due to the fact that it does not require any development or specific technical support work nor additional time of exclusive work. Furthermore, Magento team has developed a very easy-to-use fully automatic module installation feature fully integrated in the Magento application. Thus, no additional fees should be applied for modules, components and template installation as well.

Considering the facts above, TMDHosting provides free Magento installation as well as free modules, language packs and templates installation included in our Magento hosting package.

Knowledge base, tutorials and extras

It is very important to check your future host knowledge base and tutorials available. The more information is provided by your hosting company, the more experienced their representatives are with the support and hosting service of the Magento application. The most important information you should be looking is a straight forward guidelines on how to install, configure and maintain your eCommerce Magento website.

We completely understand that as much as possible information should be available for our customers. Thus, we have created a content-rich tutorial base for Magento, as well as many video tutorials.

Additionally, we have created unique Mangeto templates which are freely available for our customers. Please note that these templates are not available for public download and only as a TMDHosting customer you can take advantage of having your unique look and feel for your eCommerce website.

Technical support and eCommerce experience

Even with the best knowledge base your Magento host should provide excellent support. This is of a great importance in order to make sure that you will be able to build your eCommerce website trouble-free from the first to the very last step. Only a support team with good understanding of the eCommerce concept and a lot of experience with online shops can provide accurate and timely assistance.

General Hosting plan features

Despite all the Magento related configuration settings and requirements you should be looking for a feature-rich hosting plan. Most probably you will need email accounts, additional databases for other applications as well as FTP accounts and statistics of your website visits. Last but not least, SSL feature should be available for you as a hosting feature upgrade in order to make sure that your website will be able to provide secure payment process. All of the above should be unlimited and freely included in your hosting package.

In our desire to create a complete all-in-one eCommerce Magento hosting package we have collected all the required basic hosting features such as Emails, MySQL database support and FTP as well as specially optimized hosting environment for the Mangeton platform. Please review our Magento hosting package and feel free to contact our experienced representatives via the live chat.

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Jan 30

How to start your own eCommerce website

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Nowadays Internet is the fastest growing market in the world. Thus, there is nothing more reasonable than your desire to step into it and sell your products world wide via your eCommerce website.

Paid or open source – that is the question

Of course, before you start you should choose the platform of your online shop that will best fit your needs and budget. You can always hire a team of developers to build your very own shopping cart but in most cases this will be an expensive solution. In case you would like to save some money you may choose between the free open source applications and the paid products on the marked.

Here comes the question why should someone pay for a shopping cart when there are plenty of open source applications available to download and use free of charge. Because of the growing need of secure and reliable platforms the open source applications became more and more stable and functional. In addition, a large number of independent contributors developed many modules, components and addons to these applications in order to fit the needs of the larger number of people who want to start their online shop.

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