Why do you essentially need a mobile app for your business?

In today’s mobile world, mobile apps have become an integral part of almost every business, irrespective of their industry and size. Nowadays, mobile apps are no longer just games or entertainment programs. You have so many mobile apps available in the market certainly used for eCommerce, finance and management.

Mobile apps help any business to improve efficiency and productivity. While most companies have their own website, it is undeniably more profitable for them to also develop a mobile app.

These are some of the reasons why you essentially need a mobile app for your business:

• Capture mobile commerce: One of the main reason your business requires a mobile app is to capture mobile commerce. Because, the number of customers using their mobile devices to make purchases has been drastically increasing over the last few years. A mobile app can frame the purchasing experience in a way that is reliable and consistent with the brand. Also, it allows for various kinds of sales such as micro payments from anywhere in the world.

• Customer engagement: In order to increase customer engagement and drive conversions, you need to have a mobile app for your business. You can work with a professional mobile app development company to create a program that becomes a valuable resource for your customers. 

• Better customer service: It is a fact that a good customer service will help a business to increase retention and keep customers away from the competition. A mobile app, specially developed for your business, helps you to provide a fast and easy way for your customers to contact you about customer service issues from any of their convenient locations. 

• Local business: Generally, a business with a storefront must have a mobile app to increase visibility and sales. A mobile app can use geolocation or other similar technologies to search customers who are a certain distance from your store. It also provides information about your products, coupons and discounts that you provide to your customers. Hence, by using the mobile app that interacts directly to people residing nearby, local businesses can overcome the competition in their area.

• Extend the reach of the business: Today, consumers are looking for products and services through mobile devices while they are on the move. So, to remain competitive and to extend the reach of your business, you need to have a mobile app to connect with these people.

• Manage scheduling activities: In the app store, some planners and other organizing applications are readily available for mobile devices. Those applications help you to manage your schedules and other business activities, and hence make you to avoid conflicts in your business.

• Promote business: Mobile apps greatly help to promote any business efficiently and inexpensively. As almost all businesses start to build applications and endeavor to custom their marketing strategies to fit mobile devices, you can easily expect an increase in mobile advertising through mobile app development.

• Financial management: Having the ability to monitor and manage your business’ finances anywhere around the world is very efficient indeed and is very handy. Today, mobile applications are available in the app store help you perform well-organized financial management. Using mobile apps, you can easily monitor the financial standings of your company and react accordingly in order to quickly solve any problems. 

As mobile industry is booming and continuing to grow, it is advisable for any business to develop mobile apps to promote their products and services. Mobile is undeniably the way all communication is headed nowadays and so, adopting this technology is ensured to produce the perfect results for your business.

Do you want to make your shop online?

Starting an online store has many benefits over simply having a physical storefront. If you have an online store, you can avoid paying rent for physical stores and, as well, you can reach millions of customers from the comfort of your own place.

In order to have a shot at success, nevertheless, it is a good idea to put as much thought into making an online store as you would any other business. You will need to have a valuable product, a user-friendly website and a good marketing plan.

How to get start an online store?

* Developing your product and marketing plan

• Decide what you want to sell
• Offer something truly original, expertise and a user-friendly purchasing process
• Try selling your products on a small-scale before taking the plunge and starting an entire store
• Make an effectual business plan 
• Register your business according to your state’s law

* Building your own online store

• Register a domain name
• Choose a best web hosting service
• Design your website
• Choose an effective e-commerce software
• Set up a merchant account
• Use a comprehensive e-commerce service

 How to set up your own online store?

* Gather information about what you will require before you get started building your online shop. You will definitely require

• A domain name
• A web host
• A dedicated IP address for your site and private SSL
• A shopping cart script
• A payment gateway

* Set up your website
* Install your shopping cart system
* Customize your online shop

How to choose the right shopping cart software for your online store?

Once you develop an effectual marketing plan, the next step is to choose the right shopping cart software to use for your online store. Choosing the best ecommerce software can be difficult due to the amount of choices you have in the market. You need to choose the best ecommerce software, which has right features and tools for creating, maintaining and running your online store.

You can choose the best ecommerce software for your online store by looking at its price, features, bandwidth limits and overages, transaction fees, product limits, payment processing, ease of use, technical support and assistance, and so on.

Some of the famous shopping carts that are available in the market are Magento, OSCommerce, Prestashop, Zen Cart, OpenCart, Shopify, 1ShoppingCart, Shopping Cart Elite, CoreCommerce, Volusion, CS Cart, King cart, ShopSite, FoxyCart, 3d Cart, Lite Commerce, Pinnacle Cart, Bigcommerce, WP eStore, InfusionSoft and many more.

To find the best ecommerce software for your online store, first you need to determine whether you are technically savvy or not. If you are, then choose open source that will give you more flexibility and then configure the shopping cart based on your business requirements.

If you are not technically savvy, then use hosted shopping carts or website builders to quickly and easily set up your online store and start selling your products.

How to make your online store more successful?

The challenge here is not so much in how to make your online store up and running, instead it is all about how you are attracting your visitors and converting them as customers. Fortunately, the things that make the big online shops that are already available can be applied to your online business too.

The following are the things that make your online shop successful:

• Product reviews – Allow your customers to review the products they have bought from your online store. 
• Quality images – Allow your visitors visualize how the product looks like and how can be used.
• Easy payment process – Make the payment process hilariously easy for your customers to pay you.
• Fast loading times – Provide smooth shopping experience for your customers by optimizing your online shop speed.
• Quality design – Get a professionally designed online shop that adds credibility and shows your brand personality to your visitors.
• Related products – Show visitors other products people have bought together or products that are complimentary to each other.
• Easy store navigation – Make your online shop easy to navigate through with an effective category, filter and search system.
• Good product descriptions – Provide proper descriptions about your products to convert people into paying customers.
• Excellent customer support – Always be ready to deal with disgruntled customers anytime.

So, build a successful and highly profitable online store! Happy Selling Online!

Why Mobile E-Commerce or M-Commerce is crucial for your business?

The success of your business depends on the ability to adapt the latest technologies and accommodate your customers in the best possible way. Nowadays, mobile usage has been rapidly increased due to the evolution of the internet and mobile technologies. Therefore, reaching customers via their mobile devices is very important to succeeding in today’s commerce landscape.

Mobile E-Commerce or M-Commerce is the best way to reach customers in this day and age. Mobile E-commerce or M-Commerce is nothing but the use of wireless handheld devices, such as mobile phones, tablets and laptops, to conduct commercial transactions online i.e. sale and purchase of products and services, bill payment, online banking, information delivery and so on.

In this present market, mobile commerce and selling products through mobile applications have become more and more popular among people all over the globe.

The two main factors that assist the growth of mobile commerce are

• Technological advances that have given wireless handheld devices, substantial computing power and advanced capabilities.
• The demand for applications from an increasingly mobile customer and consumer base. 

The way people buy products has changed since the days of going to a shop, buying a product and paying cash for it.  Most people are no longer drive hours to a shop to find that what they want. They use their handheld devices to find the detailed information, price comparison, review and many more about products.

Recent statistics show that online shopping helps you to save 78% more time when compared to do shopping directly in store, along with saving a lot of money in travelling to and from stores.

With most mobile phones now coming with 2G, 3G, 4G or Wi-Fi facility, people have started using their mobile phones to do online shopping instead of using their desktop computers. This change has provided seamless opportunities for business prospect.

Between the year 2012 and 2013, the traffic to ecommerce websites stemming from handheld devices and thus m-commerce has experienced a 254% increase every year and an average growth of 300%. Therefore, mobile commerce is becoming very important day by day.

So, mobile optimized delivery of your online business represents a momentous opportunity to increase relationship with your customers and maximize your profit. It is evident that mobile commerce allows your business to reach your customers closer to the purchase decision anywhere, anytime and anyplace. If you don’t have your business website tuned for mobile devices, then definitely you are missing major sales opportunities.

Considering the budget aspect, the development cost of a mobile ecommerce website is comparatively less than an ordinary ecommerce website. By having a mobile ecommerce website, you just opened a new sales channel for you. Having more channels for your business will help you to increase your branding and marketing possibilities.

So, to make your mark within shoppers, make sure that you have an m-commerce or mobile ecommerce website for your business. It is not only a competitive advantage, but a necessity for your business to provide a mobile commerce solution to your customers.

Moodle – An ideal Learning Management System for Online Educational Institutes

Today, technology is changing our lives on a daily basis. Obviously, the things that we considered impossible few years back are actually being made possible with the help of technology.

In earlier days, we had to be present at school to learn and gain knowledge. If you miss a school day, then you will not get back the missed syllabus. But, this has completely changed due to technology.

Using latest technologies, you can able to study from whichever corner of the world you are in. Nowadays, you have so many Learning Management Systems that brought education closer to you whether they are for business or just for education purposes.

Moodle

Moodle is a Learning Management System that helps educators to create effective online learning websites and internet-based courses. It is open source software, which is also known as a course Management System (CMS) or a Virtual Learning Environment (VLE).

Using Moodle, developers can create plug-ins for specific new functionality. The different types of plug-ins that are supported by Moodle’s infrastructure are

• Activities
• Resource types
• Question types
• Data field types
• Graphical themes
• Authentication methods
• Enrollment methods 
• Content filters

Features

Moodle consists of several features that are considered typical of an e-learning platform. It can be used in various types of environments such as education, training and development, and business settings.

The typical features of Moodle are discussion forum, assignment submission, moodle instant messages, files download, online calendar, online news and announcement, online quiz and Wiki.

The major new features of Moodle are

• Open Badges integration
• Add-on installer
• Themes
• Forms improvements
• Enrollment
• Assignment activity
• Database activity
• Glossary activity
• Quiz activity
• Workshop activity
• Resources
• Repositories
• Course listings
• Performance improvements
• Security related improvements
• Automated functional testing

The latest version i.e. Moodle 2.6 consists of a lot of exciting new features for students, teachers and administrators. Some great new features of Moodle 2.6 are as follows:

• Add a single activity course format
• Streamlined course and category management
• Bulk course creation tool
• Enhanced marketing workflow and allocation
• Automatically notify new users of login details
• Access files from Microsoft Skydrive

Moodle customization

Moodle customization enables developers all across the world to build custom online course management system for their customers based on their requirements at affordable prices.

Hence, a large number of organizations and educational institutions have already started using this effective Learning Management System. This e-learning software solution is widely used by a huge number of primary and high schools, educational institutes, universities, government institutes, private classes, coaching classes, companies, educators and many more.

Moodle is an effective e-learning software solution for beginners who want to begin their training institutes or coaching classes and provide their students best training using modern technology. Also, it becomes beneficial for organizations to provide their employees with business related training in a contemporary way.

Moodle has a great community support of developers all across the globe. Its support team members and other freelance contributors provide a great contribution in the advancement of this development framework.
Hence, the developers get the benefit of all new features and latest versions of Moodle absolutely free. They can implement all the available features and customize e-learning system for their customers based on their requirements.

Moodle CMS Integration

Moodle CMS integration allows developers to integrate other CMS with it. By using its modular design, the developers can able to create modules and additional features. Also, the developers can use the customizing features and design highly interactive, robust and scalable Learning Management System.

If you are planning to establish your own online coaching class, then Moodle is an ideal Learning Management system. To get a professional e-learning system, hire an experienced developer, who can provide comprehensive services, such as Moodle Customization, Plug-in Development, Custom Themes Installation, CMS Integration, Database Integration, Payment Gateway Integration, User Management, Layout, Custom Designs, Template Designs, Migration, Testing, Maintenance and Support.

Moodle is a successful and valuable Learning Management System that gives global reorganization to your online business quickly and profitably.

WordPress vs. Magento : Which Ecommerce Platform is Better For Your Website?

If you are having any idea about opening up a new ecommerce website, or if you are advising anyone, who is planning to build an ecommerce website, then the very first step that you need to take is making a wise decision on which ecommerce platform should be used.

Before choosing a best ecommerce platform for your ecommerce website, there are a few basic things that you need to keep in mind.

As both the ecommerce platforms have same functionality, it is very important for you to keep in mind the background. 

WordPress:

WordPress is a free and open source blogging platform created by Matt Mullenweg and Mike Little. It is a hugely popular content management system or CMS based on PHP and MySQL. It is the single largest ecommerce platform used for content creation. When compared to other platforms, more number of blog posts is written on WordPress websites such as WordPress.org and WordPress.com platforms.

Plugin architecture is one of the very popular features that enable developers to extend its abilities beyond the core installation. WordPress has a huge database that consists of more than 26,000 plugins, each plugin offers custom features and functions that enable developers to build websites based on their specific requirements.

Magento: 

On the other hand, Magento is also an open source ecommerce web application that is developed by Varien with the help from developers within the open source community. Magento was started as open source software; hence it was relatively very easy to launch and then it grew rapidly to a point that there is actually more money spent on Magento based websites all around the globe. That is definitely part of why eBay bought Magento now.

Similar to WordPress being a blogging platform that moved into ecommerce, Magento is also an ecommerce platform that added blogging as a plug-in.

So, which ecommerce platform is best?

It is a fact that there is never a perfect solution for any problem, but if you understand the background of the two ecommerce platforms, you can able to make the right decision on which one will be the best suitable for your ecommerce website.

You may want to build a website that is going to be strictly an ecommerce play, possibly with a blog attached just to enhance the website for good visibility, search engine optimization and user engagement. 

Or, you may want to create a website that is going to be a collection of blogs, posts, customer interactions and so on with an element related to that hoping to sell products that are directly tied to the content that is created.

Based on your requirements, you need to choose the best ecommerce platform. With a pure ecommerce website, Magento may be the best option. If your website is more of a content play, then WordPress may be the way you need to go.